


The Wilderness

by Eloarei



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Apocalypse-light, But he's trying, Eddie-centric, F/M, Gen, Human Disaster Eddie Brock, Little emphasis on romance, M/M, Male Pronouns for Venom Symbiote (Marvel), Multi, NaNoWriMo 2018, Neurological Disorders, Original Character(s), Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pandemics, Slow Build, This reads different in 2020 than it did in 2018 haha, Zombie Hunters, brief suicide mention
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 54,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26795515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloarei/pseuds/Eloarei
Summary: A comet struck earth; the parasites attacked humans; zombies threw the world into chaos. Still, the world was managing. People had learned how to fight back and protect themselves. That wasn't a big issue. For Eddie, the unexpected problem came in the form of asymbiote--a parasite he didn't want to get rid of. Now the issue wasn't protecting himself fromthem,it was protecting'us'from a world that didn't understand.
Relationships: Dan Lewis/Anne Weying, Eddie Brock & Dan Lewis & Anne Weying, Eddie Brock & Original Character(s), Eddie Brock & Venom Symbiote, Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Comments: 99
Kudos: 130





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My NaNoWriMo fic from 2018! I had _so_ much fun writing it; it was my most successful year! ...Aside from the fact that I didn't finish it. Which is why I hadn't yet posted it, despite having 50k. But with NaNo2020 going now, I have a chance and a reason to write the second half! Therefore, I'm hoping to post a chapter every ten days, until the end of November-- at which point, _in theory,_ the rest of the story will be done. 
> 
> I apologize ahead of time that the pacing might be odd in these first few chapters. I had absolutely zero outline when I rushed headlong into the fic, and though I do have one now, I didn't go back and change anything from the beginning. So if it's less than professionally paced, that's why! =] 
> 
> Estimated total length: about 100k. Estimated total Symbrock content: that's a good question! Probably not a romantic epic, but maybe some mush later on. (I love a good romantic epic!; this just doesn't look like it's gonna be one.)

Being young could be hard. People always expected you to know what you wanted to do with your life, often before you'd had enough experience to really figure it out. It hadn't been that hard for Eddie though, not really. He'd always been kind of a people person, so when it came time to take an elective that wasn't a sport, he joined the school newspaper and then had just kind of run with it. He was pretty good at it, and he liked being involved with current events, getting up in everyone's business-- with a cause, of course. It wasn't even that that was his dream career or anything; he hadn't wanted to be a journalist when he was a kid (if he could remember correctly, he'd first wanted to be a firefighter, and then an astronaut) but it was definitely good enough, so he stuck with it, and college found him pursuing journalism professionally. 

Then the asteroid struck. 

He remembered doing several articles, first about the devastating immediate damage of the crash, the several square miles just _leveled_ by the impact (nowhere near where he lived, luckily, and nowhere densely populated, but terrible all the same), and then the sickness that had started spreading in all the nearby towns and cities. Those afflicted became unpredictable and violent, until eventually, inevitably, they turned on whoever was in the vicinity, attacking them in their apparent death throes, dying and starting the process anew with their victim as the disease transferred over, bodies left in its wake. By the third article, Eddie didn't want to write anymore. 

He was caught between paralyzing fear and the need to help his fellow man, between flight and fight, as the wave of parasites washed across the country and he was swept along with the tide. Everyone was. Normal life was put on hold (or slowed to a frightened crawl) as this menace took them.   
  
It was a living parasite, they said, and it lived in the brains of its unfortunate hosts. It lived in everyone else's brains too, in a less literal sense. The fear wormed its way into probably every human on earth, because the nature of the parasite let it incubate and hide for several days before its host started to show clear symptoms. So although travel was greatly restricted as more details were uncovered about them, the parasites still slipped through the cracks like so much water, and it wasn’t long before _everyone_ lived in fear of infection.   
  
That wasn’t to say that people were defenseless. Through trial and error and no small amount of vicious instinct, humans soon found the parasites’ weaknesses and exploited them gleefully. Concerned citizens became watchmen, and watchmen became hunters, and tracked down the infected hosts in parties not terribly dissimilar to torch-bearing mobs.   
  
That was really the last purposeful thing Eddie had done with his life, he couldn’t help but think. Two years after the outbreak he’d spent regularly joining hunts to track down what they came to think of as ‘zombies’-- infected humans (and sometimes animals; too often animals, hiding away until they could find a better host) which could sometimes be saved, and sometimes were dispatched with fire-- the parasites’ only real cure.   
  
He didn’t dislike the job. Even more than journalism, it felt like something he could do to help people-- but more immediate, and certainly more viscerally pleasing. Torching zombies did make him feel rather nauseous, listening to their inhuman screams and watching them writhe on the ground in agony, even when he knew that the human the zombie had once been was gone. There was a window between showing symptoms and becoming violently feral when a person could be saved, but after that point was passed fire was the only answer.   
  
Discovering the parasites’ weakness to certain sound frequencies was a lifesaver, in both a metaphorical and literal sense. For months the humans had been in a constant state of paranoia, watching their backs in the vain hope that a hungry zombie wasn’t about to sneak up and take a bite out of them, or worse-- shed its host onto them, because at that point it was very nearly a death sentence. You could _watch_ a person get infected (and Eddie did, multiple horrifying times), and there was nothing to do but take them into captivity and make a guinea pig out of them, and watch as the parasite ate their organs over the course of a week or so, until they were little more than an animated corpse. And when there was nothing left to eat, and no new host to transfer to, both host and parasite would die. (Eddie had never had to watch that happen; it was always locked away where only doctors and scientists and military generals could see. But he’d heard about it, in more detail than his nightmares cared to know.)   
  
But finally someone realized that sonic waves disrupted the parasites’ hold on their hosts, and then it was a (relatively) simple matter of lobbing a sonic grenade at a zombie, and watching as the horrifying black goo bubbled up out of them and tried to scurry away-- only to be showered in flames until it boiled down to nothing. It was gross, but they saved a lot of people that way; anyone who hadn’t been taken for more than a few days could often be saved… if not entirely repaired.   
  
That. That was the real problem they were facing now. That was the problem Eddie was facing.   
  
Even less than journalism, hunting zombies wasn’t his dream job. He liked it. He was good at it. But he couldn’t say it was his life’s passion, and he certainly wasn’t willing to die for it. But dying to save someone? Sure, maybe. ...Yeah, yes, of course he would. And he knew this because he’d done it-- or, had been willing to do it. That was why he wasn’t a hunter anymore. They’d cornered a zombie, down in a suburb that had been abandoned like so many of its kin, and they’d shocked the parasite out of it, and Eddie swore he didn’t have a death-wish and he _wasn’t_ any sort of martyr, but when he saw the thing lunge for one of his teammates, he hadn’t thought twice about pushing them out of the way and getting a chest-full of parasite for his troubles. It had latched onto him, and he could feel it leaching into his skin, hot and sick like venom as it entered his bloodstream.   
  
He’d seen this happen plenty of times, but watching it happen to someone else was nothing like feeling it for yourself. Every nerve in his body seemed to catch fire, and he doubled over in pain and an overwhelming feeling of disgust, a whole-body queasiness that forced his stomach to lurch up and spit out every ounce of searing acid it could in hopes of dislodging the parasite. Time meant _nothing_ as the thing rampaged through his veins, through his every cell, ravenously devouring him from the inside. He could feel its intense hunger, its desperation to eat-- and fear. He was _terrified,_ like he’d never been before. Angry, desperate, and scared. _Seeking_ , but for what he couldn’t tell.   
  
And then it was over. He was assaulted by a sonic blast that shook the parasite out of him. Blinded with pain, he didn’t really _see_ as one of his teammates lit it up and it squirmed and died. But he heard its voiceless squeals echoing in his head, and he _felt it._ The heat of the flames not just _on_ his skin, but _in_ it, like it was Eddie the other hunters were remorselessly burning to death.   
  
He blacked out then. It was just too much to bear.   
  
When he came to, it was some hours later. He’d been carried back into the safety of the city, with its sonic disruptors all along the border to keep the parasites out. One of his teammates had taken him to a clinic to be checked over, though they hadn’t stayed to see him wake. Eddie couldn’t help thinking that maybe they already knew he wasn’t going to be joining them again.   
  
From the outside, it seemed no damage had been done. He looked as whole and hale as when he’d gone out into the wilds that morning. But according to his scans-- and every other hunter that had been temporarily possessed-- the thing had wreaked havoc on his insides. Most of his organs had sustained light damage, spots of tissue eroded here and there like the parasite had taken haphazard bites of whatever it could reach. One of his heart valves was now leaking, stuttering in his chest. And his brain was lit up and shadowed in patterns the doctors could recognize weren’t normal, but wouldn’t be able to fully identify without further testing.   
  
He didn’t want to say he felt sick, because he didn’t, not in the way anyone would have understood. He couldn’t feel that his organs were having a hard time, and if his heart was fluttering he didn’t know it wasn’t because of nerves. But there was no way he could say that he felt fine, either. He felt worse, by far, than he had ever felt, in ways he couldn’t explain. And the worst of it was that there was nothing anyone could do about it. This was all too common in his situation, but there was no way to turn back the damage the parasite had done, save turning back time.   
  
\--And if he could turn back time, he knew he wouldn’t stop at the attack. Sometimes he thought he wouldn’t stop until he hadn’t been born.   
  
But they said that was the brain damage talking. Not that anybody ever phrased it like that. ‘Synapses firing incorrectly’, ‘chemical imbalance’. They gave him some medication for it (and for the other minor organ failures), but that was only ever so useful. In the end, he just had to deal with it. This was his new self. This was who he had become, who the parasite had made him in its one endlessly long minute with him.   
  
He remembered it at night. It haunted his dreams, with searing pain and a voice in his head calling _‘help me’_ even as it leered and jeered at him. He remembered the flames like it had been his own waking funeral pyre, and often he woke in a sweat, burning from the heat of it.   
  
Not unexpectedly (and nobody blamed him for it either), Eddie didn’t rejoin the hunters. He wasn’t up to it physically or mentally, and if he slipped up and a parasite got hold of him again, it would probably leave him in critical condition.   
  
With his mental state the way it was, his dreams leaving him preoccupied even on days when the depression only simmered quietly beneath the surface, he didn’t feel up to pursuing journalism again either. ...He didn’t feel up to pursuing much of anything. He didn’t feel up to _keeping_ what he _had._ All those plans for the future, Eddie simply didn’t care for them anymore. Jobs, relationships, _desires._ For all that he was supposed to be settling _into_ his life now, all he felt was that he’d accidentally settled somewhere just out of it, pushed just out of bounds by that fateful encounter, left limping along after the ghostly image of what his life was _supposed_ to be.   
  
So as it turned out, while being young could be hard, being grown was hard on him in a completely different way. 


	2. Chapter 2

The world had been turned on its head in the years since a comet crash had brought on a low-key zombie apocalypse, but there were still a lot of jobs that needed to be done, and luckily at least a good handful of them were suitable for Eddie, meaning he could continue living even after his disastrous encounter with a parasite-- even if he wasn’t exactly enthused about it.    
  
In all honesty, things weren’t  _ that _ different from how they’d been before. The biggest difference was that now people had to constantly watch their backs when they left the city. Travelling for fun was kind of a thing of the past. In all likelihood, you wouldn’t find a lot of thriving rest-stops along the road anyway, since most people had migrated towards more heavily-guarded cities, away from indefensible suburbs and country towns. With the technological advancements of sonic disruptors, people definitely  _ could _ live wherever they wanted… but most of them wanted to live where they knew there would be others to watch out for them.    
  
Eddie was definitely one of those people. He had no desire to go out into the zombie-infested wilds-- even if they really weren’t that ‘wild’, and they honestly weren’t especially ‘infested’. According to the latest statistics, you could probably go out and stand around completely defenseless as far away as possible from the city and still only stumble upon a handful of zombies in a day (if you weren’t looking for them), but that was still far too many for Eddie. Even knowing that his portable disruptor should keep him safe from any but the most desperate parasite, he still wouldn’t go traipsing around outside of the city without a  _ damn _ good reason.    
  
So he stayed inside the city’s invisible-fence sound barrier, and did whatever odd jobs came his way.    
  
One of his favorite jobs was something that gave him a sense of peace, for a few different reasons. The frequency that the sonic disruptors operated at was not harmful to humans like it was to parasites, but it wasn’t exactly a joy to listen to for extended periods of time either. It could get irritating after a while, and there’d been stories of people turning them off so they could get a few moments of peace and quiet, and then, predictably, being attacked by zombies. Luckily, some enterprising musicians, or… sound engineers or someone, eventually realized that music could be made including those frequencies, and since then everyone had taken to replacing the terrible buzz of handheld disruptors with, essentially, walkmans. So these days, the city was always full of the overlapping murmur of not just chatter but whatever everyone was listening to at the time.    
  
When things went to hell (the second time, when he quit hunting), Eddie had taken up guitar, at the suggestion of several friends and doctors, as something to calm him and center him, and something to do with his hands when he was between jobs. He took to it pretty well, considering that when it came to instruments he hadn’t touched more than a plastic recorder back in fourth grade, and hadn’t been particularly good at  _ that. _ But he was good enough at guitar that he could make a little money playing for the new bands and recording studios that had popped up to take advantage of this new trend-- and all in the name of helping people (or at least their sanity). 

But it wasn't quite enough to pay the bills, which was why he did a lot of dishwashing and other miscellaneous chores, and why he was long-term rooming with his two best friends. 

Actually, Anne was his ex. The two of them had been  _ pretty serious, _ back in college, when he was on track to actually do something with his life, but things had just… gone downhill, and it hadn't worked out between them. Eddie didn't blame her for breaking up with him when he became unstable. It was a lot of work for  _ him  _ to deal with  _ himself _ ; he knew it was more than she needed on her plate, especially because she was one of those kinds of people who was really going places. She'd been studying as a lawyer, which ended up still being a pretty useful knowledge base, post mini-apocalypse. Eddie could hardly fathom what people had to sue each other about when the world had gone half to hell, but they did, so Anne was always gainfully employed.    


There had been a short while when they hadn't really spoken, when Eddie was too caught up in his own head and Anne didn't know what to say to him because of it, and that had been a unique kind of terrible because even if they weren't meant to _be_ together, Eddie still cared about her. Then they'd run into each other again and they'd decided to catch up, and now he was living with her and her boyfriend, Dan.   
  
It was funny because he'd really expected not to like Dan. He had everything that Eddie _didn't_. He had _Anne,_ and that should have been enough to make Eddie dislike him. But he also had a nice and level-headed personality, and he was a doctor-- the sort who genuinely cared about people. He was undeniably a good guy, and the two of them got along maybe surprisingly well. At very least it was easily enough that when the city started becoming kind of cramped, and things got a little tighter for everyone (even doctors and lawyers), there was no problem with the three of them moving in together. And after a while, it wasn’t even that weird, the fact that he was third wheel to their frankly ideal relationship.   
  
It probably helped that they both honestly liked him. Obviously Anne liked him (for all that she really just couldn’t see him as a romantic partner anymore), but good-natured Dan was fond of Eddie as well, more than Eddie sometimes thought he deserved. Now was one of those moments when Eddie was wondering why on earth Dan liked him, why he would pick him for anything that basically anyone else could do. He sat across the small dining table from him, hunched over a bowl of cereal while Dan sat up straight over a plate of eggs, and stared at the clean-shaved well-to-do man who was in the process of dropping _several_ emotional bombs on him.   
  
“I’m planning on proposing to Anne,” Dan told him, smiling winningly.   
  
“Oh,” Eddie replied. “Oh, that’s great. Good, that’s-- that’s good. It’s been a few years now, so, yeah, why not?”   
  
Dan’s grin widened, and he set down his fork so he could focus all his attention on the conversation. “You think it’s a good idea?” he asked. “I wanted to ask you first, since… you know. You’re still really close to Anne. In some ways, you know her better than I do. So I wanted to make sure you were cool with it.”   
  
Eddie’s eyes widened, feeling a bit called out about his and Anne’s somewhat strange relationship, put in the spotlight as her meaningful ex, and _apparently_ the one with the power to ‘give her away’, as it was. “I’m cool with it,” he promised, shrugging in a submissive sort of way. “Yeah, it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere. Not like it’s really my business even if it was.”   
  
“Well you’re the only other one whose opinion I really trust when it comes to her,” Dan said, shrugging much more fluidly than Eddie-- much like everything he did. (Eddie didn’t begrudge him that, not at all.) “You think she’ll say yes?”   
  
Laughing, Eddie shook his head. He could hardly believe Dan was actually asking such a thing. “Of course she’ll say yes. Why wouldn’t she?”   
  
A pleased blush came over Dan’s face, and he took another bite of his eggs, chewing them slowly as he looked off into the middle distance somewhere over Eddie’s shoulder. “I’m glad you think so, since I already ordered the engagement ring.”   
  
Eddie hummed a polite question mark, and listened as Dan cheerfully described the white-gold diamond-and-sapphire ring he’d picked out, how much he desperately hoped she’d like it, how he couldn’t wait to give it to her, and plan the wedding, and spend the rest of their lives together because he really thought she was just the most special woman in the world and etcetera. Honestly, Eddie really liked to hear Dan go on like this-- partly because it was nice to see him talk about things he was passionate for, and partly because Eddie agreed on quite a lot of it, and _largely_ because he really was happy for them and wanted the best for them. He guessed though, he still harbored some kind of less-than-entirely-pleasant feeling about the situation, because his expression had apparently turned melancholy. Dan’s face fell into this sad, pitying look he sometimes got around Eddie, when he noticed.   
  
“Even when we do get married though, it’s not like we’re going to just kick you out,” he said, looking like he was thinking about reaching across the table to pat Eddie’s hand, but knew better. “You’re part of the family! And, actually, that reminds me. If she _does_ say yes--” (--as if it was remotely possible she wouldn’t, Eddie thought.) “--will you be my best man?”   
  
That caught him off guard, and his spoon slipped from his hand and clattered into his cereal bowl, splashing what little milk was left in it. “...Yeah,” he said instinctively. “I’d be honored.” And if his mouth wasn’t really gaping wide open in surprise, that was definitely the expression he was making internally. He wasn’t going to actually question Dan’s decision, but he couldn’t help wondering _why._ _Him?_ As best man? Dan was a popular and likeable guy. He could’ve got any number of other people to do it. Co-workers. Community leaders. Other friends and family. Anyone, really. _Carlton Drake_ probably would have at least considered it. But he chose Eddie, and he seemed actually pleased with the decision, if his smile when Eddie agreed to it was any indication.   
  
“That’s great! Thank you. I know it’ll make Anne happy too, to have you there.”   
  
Eddie wasn’t one hundred percent sure about that, but he was rarely one hundred percent sure about anything these days, so he just shrugged and went along with it. There was still time for Dan to change his mind, if he wanted to. And Eddie wouldn’t be terribly upset if he did, he swore.   
  
To some degree, he’d been expecting something like this for ages. It was already a small miracle that they’d allowed him to live with them for so long, when he wasn’t contributing much to the household except a little bit of money that they honestly didn’t even strictly need. He knew the two of them could have gotten along alright without his meager earnings, and if he tried to do more than his fair share of dishes in order to make up for it, well, that probably didn’t mean that much. He knew they were going to want to settle into a ‘normal’ life eventually (as normal as you could get when there were zombies wandering around just a few miles away in either direction)-- probably have kids, too-- and he knew they probably would want their own space to do it, and more privacy than they had when he was always hanging around.   
  
Sure, Dan _said_ they weren’t going to kick him out. He _said_ Eddie was part of the family. But despite that, Eddie couldn’t help but think he wouldn’t be remotely surprised if they eventually suggested that he start fending for himself. And it wasn’t that he _couldn’t…_   
  
But the nightmares… Sometimes they still plagued him. Sometimes he still woke up feeling like he was burning, like someone was screaming in his mind, and even though he never called for help or even really told them about it, it just helped a lot to know they were there, that maybe they _could_ help, and that they _probably_ cared about him. The two of them were his best friends, and he didn’t think any new roommate he might find could take their place. Not in that regard. Really, not in any regard. He hated to think of them finally getting rid of him.   
  
There was nothing he could do about it, though, except for take Dan at his word and not be _too_ paranoid. On top of that, he made sure to help out as much as possible, to make himself as useful as he could, in a mostly-subconscious effort to make himself seem less expendable.   
  
Anne noticed his apparent change in behavior, though she optimistically attributed it to a better mood. “Feeling pretty good this week, huh?” she asked as he got ready to run out to his third job in two days.   
  
“Oh, y’know.” Eddie shrugged. “Just doing what I can.”   
  
“Good,” Anne said lightly, smiling at him in a way that made him feel a bit childish (though he couldn’t deny that he liked it). “Are they trying out some new meds, or…?”   
  
Eddie shook his head. “Not as far as I know,” he told her, continuing with his routine and hoping she wouldn’t press the matter. He couldn’t blame her for wondering if the change was medical; he knew he hadn’t been the most productive housemate, the past few years. And he didn’t really mind what she thought was the reason he was suddenly almost manic with his efforts, as long as she didn’t suspect it was because of the conversation he’d had with Dan. On top of not wanting to ruin the secret about the proposal (because that would be a real dick move), he didn’t want Anne to try to sit him down and convince him that she and Dan cared about him, because he knew she would.   
  
So he worked, as much as he could manage, and kept the apartment tidy, and generally tried not to be a freeloader. And he kept himself as cheerful as possible too, because he didn’t want to put a damper on Dan’s boisterous mood. As complicated as his emotions regarding them both might be, he really was happy for them, for the way it looked like their life was turning. They were good people. They deserved to be happy.   
  
It was a few weeks after Dan had initially told Eddie the ‘good news’, when he turned around as he was about to head out the door towards the hospital and regarded Eddie with a hopeful look. “You’re not working today, are you?” he asked (neutrally; he didn’t sound judgmental). When Eddie shook his head, Dan looked relieved. “Then can you do me a favor? I’m expecting an important delivery this morning. Could you sign for it for me?”   
  
“The ring?” Eddie asked, smiling knowingly.   
  
The starry-eyed look that crossed Dan’s face made Eddie feel like he’d probably do just about anything the guy asked. “Tell me what you think of it when you see it. I had it custom made, but I’m still so nervous. I mean, I know she likes sapphires, and white gold better than yellow gold, but I’m still wondering if maybe I should have gone with platinum?”   
  
Laughing at Dan’s flustered babbling, Eddie said, “I’m sure it’s gonna be perfect,” and Dan sighed in relief at Eddie’s reassurance and went on to work with a wave over his shoulder. For the rest of the morning, he puttered around the house, cleaning up where he could and making calls about jobs-- though he made sure to throw some regular pants on instead of lounging around in sweats, knowing he’d have to open the door to greet the delivery person. He was in the middle of feeding Mr. Belvedere (Anne’s cat, who really only seemed to _tolerate_ Eddie at the best of times) when the doorbell rang and he rushed to meet it.   
  
The exchange was simple enough, just that Eddie had to sign in about fifteen different places before the courier would hand the tiny package over, since it was (‘apparently’) quite the expensive purchase. He leaned in the doorway as he poured over the several pages of agreements, hoping that he wasn’t missing anything by just skimming them. It wasn’t like he could _not_ sign the papers, in any event, since Dan was expecting this. So he skimmed and signed, and skimmed and signed, etc, for what felt like several very long minutes, while the courier waited patiently.   
  
He was on the last signature (balancing the clipboard on his knee as he signed) when the young delivery man asked in a slightly suspicious voice, “Uh, do you have a cat?”   
  
“Huh? No, of course not,” Eddie replied, without thinking about it much. Pet ownership in the city had become illegal since the zombie outbreak (due to the way that parasites could hide so effectively in animals), so even though it wasn’t a strictly enforced law, he wasn’t going to admit they had a cat in the house, just in case someone wanted to cause trouble. That would have been the surest way to break Anne’s heart, since she’d had Mr. B since college. And since they usually kept him in Anne’s bedroom when it wasn’t lunchtime, it wasn’t really a problem.   
  
“Oh… uh, okay,” the courier said, a shrug in his voice as he took the papers from Eddie and handed over the package. “Well alright. Have a good day.”   
  
“You too,” Eddie said distractedly, closing the door between them and wandering over to the kitchen table to finally dig into the package. Dan had told him to look at it, so that was what he was going to do. He carefully cut the packaging tape away from the box, and then from the box that was inside that one, until he could pull out a little silver velvet box and gently open it to find probably the most lovely engagement ring he could imagine. It really was as gorgeous as Dan had described. Anne was going to love it-- which made Eddie’s heart skip a little in a melancholy way that he was pretty used to by now.   
  
A beautiful ring to signify the next step in Anne and Dan’s perfect relationship… He hated that he wasn’t one hundred percent overjoyed for them. He was _happy,_ he really was. But there was still this sense of discontent sowed into him that none of them deserved to have to deal with, and he wished it would just go away already. He wished that there was something he could do to achieve the sort of peace in his life that… that his two friends were obviously grasping. And if he could do it without bringing them down, that would really be ideal.   
  
Sighing, he snapped shut the lid on the little box, and stood to go hide it away in Dan’s nightstand, but as he was heading that direction he noticed the cat food bowl on the counter and his memory clicked into place. Anne’s bedroom door was open; he’d been feeding Mr. Belvedere when the courier rang, and then he’d stood there with the door open for several long minutes and the guy had seen him, and…   
  
...And where was he?   
  
“Mr. B?” Eddie called warily, glancing around the living room. He set the box down on an end table and looked under the couch-- then under the coffee table, in all the corners, under the covers of Anne’s bed, behind the shower curtain, in the kitchen pantry, and everywhere else he could think to look, but Mr. B was nowhere to be found.   
  
_“Shit,”_ Eddie muttered, staring at the front door in disdain. “Shit, shit, shit. Where did you go, Mr. B?”   
  
In a moment of clarity, Eddie remembered that the cat’s collar had a tracker tag on it-- another of Dan’s very bright ideas, which Eddie had thought was probably overkill at the time. But now he was hastily typing the tag’s numbers into his phone and thanking god that the man always had his head about him. As the tracking program loaded, he shoved his feet into his boots and grabbed up his keys and ran out into the hallway, just barely managing to remember to lock the door behind him.   
  
Glancing down at his phone, he found that the cat was already several blocks away and still on the move, as if he had some place to be. Trying not to draw any attention to himself, Eddie hurried out into the street and followed the little dot as it moved purposefully towards the outskirts of the city. “Pain-in-the-ass senile cat,” he muttered, chewing on his lip as he speed-walked. Every time it seemed he was getting close, he’d find himself at some sort of dead-end or barrier and have to go around, giving Mr. Belvedere time to take the lead again. As he neared the edge of the city, and the sonic disruptors began to ring in his ears, he slowed down and took a look around him. Aside from the incessant buzzing, it had been quiet for a good block already, mostly everyone keeping far enough inside the border to avoid the noise and any potential zombies that might somehow stagger through (not that it had ever happened, to anyone’s knowledge). This part of the town was practically abandoned. Police wandered through on patrol, but there was nobody hanging around… and nobody to tell him not to go out there.   
  
But out there… He hadn’t been outside of the city in years, and unless some miracle wiped the parasites off the face of the earth, he hadn’t been planning on giving ‘out there’ another try, maybe ever. But there was no way he could face Anne again, if he had to tell her that he’d let her cat run away, out into the wilderness, where it would probably starve or be eaten. Of all the things he could blame himself for, that would be his biggest sin.   
  
Taking a deep breath, he stood up tall and then let it out slowly. Head held high, phone in hand, he took first one shaking step towards the unmarked border, then another, then a third, until his stride was steady and he was again jogging after Mr. Belvedere’s blinking dot. There was no way he was letting this cat die on his watch.   
  
It took a good ten minutes before he finally started closing in on the cat. Mr. B had stopped a few blocks away, according to the tracker. Eddie hoped it was because he’d gotten tired of running, not because he’d fallen into a trap or just ditched his collar. ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ he told himself, just keeping up a steady pace-- until he heard a heart-stopping screech that sounded far too catlike for his liking. Pushing himself into a sprint and trying not to trip on the cracked, disused suburban pavement, he closed the distance as quickly as he could. A little voice in the back of his head yelled not to go, because he was just _inviting_ trouble, and he hadn’t even thought to bring his walkman to ward off parasites because he was simply _that much_ of an idiot.   
  
He held his breath as he rounded the corner of a gas station-- and released it when he realized there were no zombies in sight, and no other visible threats either. There was only Mr. Belvedere by the side of the road, tearing into a bird with wild abandon.   
  
“Hey, Mr. B…” Eddie said softly as he took careful steps towards the cat, trying not to spook him. “I see you’ve got yourself a nice dead dove there, but how about we head home and you finish off that chicken Anne chopped up for you last night? Huh?”   
  
(He knew Mr. Belvedere didn’t give a shit what he was saying, but he’d always heard that a soothing voice was important when trying to catch animals, and honestly, the talking was mostly for him anyway, to fill the strange silence of the dead zone outside the city.)   
  
The cat didn’t look up from its kill, so he continued to approach it until he could finally, carefully, stroke a hand down his back, through his ruffled fur, murmuring to him as he did. Mr. B hunkered lower to the ground and refused to be picked up until he was done devouring his prey (and Eddie idly wondered how a twelve year old indoor cat had managed to even catch a bird in the first place), so Eddie crouched there and waited, holding his breath and keeping a keen ear out for danger. Finally, eventually, the cat began to lick his lips and clean off his whiskers with his paws, so Eddie took that as a sign that he was finished with lunch and ready to go home. He picked Mr. B up and tucked him under his hoodie, and high-tailed it back towards the city, keeping as quiet as possible.   
  
He considered himself extremely lucky that Mr. B didn’t put up a fight as he jogged them home, letting Eddie cradle him close under his shirt. To be honest, he seemed pretty comfortable there. Maybe he really had worn himself out, or maybe he was just too full after his meal to care. He was like a little furnace under his jacket-- a purring little furnace. It wasn’t often that he cuddled with the cat (since it had never seemed to like him before), but he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be this hot. Eddie hoped the thing hadn’t gotten sick.   
  
All was well (no zombies or other obstacles to hinder them) until they started nearing the city’s border. Suddenly Mr. Belvedere went rigid, his whole tiny body tense, and he began to shake and growl.   
  
“Woah, hold on,” Eddie murmured, holding the cat to his chest. “We’re almost home. Just calm down.”   
  
Mr. Belvedere did not calm down, and Eddie was almost afraid he was going to break the dumb animal, the way it was struggling against his hold. It thrashed, and Eddie held it tighter, ignoring the way its claws sunk through his t-shirt and into his skin, stinging, burning. He just picked up his pace, breaking into a full run through the irritating disruptor zone, until he was back in the thick of the city, where he slowed to a speed walk so he wasn’t out of place.   
  
The fight had apparently gone out of Mr. B, as he slumped against Eddie’s shredded chest, not purring but at least not trying to claw through him like the reverse of one of those creatures from Alien. He knew he’d be in pretty bad pain later, but right now the adrenaline was still pumping through him and he was just relieved he’d rescued Annie’s cat and wasn’t going to have to face her wrath (or disappointment, which might be worse).   
  
To add to his relief, he’d managed to get home before either of his roommates, so there was no long talk to be had about what a bad person he was for letting Mr. Belvedere get out in the first place. Inside (with the door _securely shut_ behind him, and locked) he put Mr. B down and let him finish his first lunch while Eddie went to the bathroom and dug through the medicine cabinet for disinfectant and ointment and whatever else he could find for his razor-thin new chest wounds. It stung like a bitch as he rubbed alcohol over the cuts, but he figured at least he hadn’t been chomped on by a zombie. The day hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a lot better than it _could_ have been, all things considered. He’d even (sort of) conquered his fear of leaving the city-- not that he thought he was going to want to do it again any time soon.   
  
With his cat-scratches freshly cleaned and bandaged, he went back out into the kitchen and ushered Mr. B into Anne’s bedroom, taking the little box he’d left on the end table with him and putting it in the nightstand on Dan’s side. Then he left and closed the bedroom door (double checking that Mr. B was in there) and went to his own room, deciding he’d more than earned a nap. 


	3. Chapter 3

Not unexpectedly, the nightmares found him again. He dreamt of chasing Mr. Belvedere out in the wilds, chasing and chasing him, and then stumbling to a stop, shocked, as a zombie came out of nowhere and grabbed two handfuls of Mr. B’s fine fur, and sunk its teeth straight into him. Dream-Eddie could only stare in horror as the abomination tore into the cat, blood dripping down its pale, skinny arms. When it was done, it turned to Eddie with wide eyes, pupils blown out, gaping mouth bloodstained, and lunged for him many times quicker than he had any hope of avoiding. He screamed as it latched on to him, biting into his neck, tearing its way up into his face, crunching the bones of his skull so it could dig into his brain--   
  
He woke in a cold sweat, shivering and gasping, and lifted his hand to his face to feel that it was whole. Sighing heavily, he collapsed back to the mattress and just breathed for a minute, before deciding he wasn’t going to be able to sleep again, this coated in sweat and flooded with adrenaline.   
  
Throwing some pants on (but eschewing a shirt), he wandered out into the main room and poured himself a glass of water. He was a little surprised to realize it was dark out; he’d slept longer than he meant to. The clock on the microwave read 11:42 and it was quiet. He thought Anne and Dan might both be asleep, until the lock clicked in the front door and Dan came in, looking as exhausted as one might expect after a fourteen hour day.   
  
“Hey Eddie,” he said as he locked the door behind him and hung up his keys and jacket. “How’s it going?”   
  
“Same ol’, same ol’,” Eddie replied, gulping down the water.   
  
Dan nodded in commiseration; even fancy doctors understood the daily grind. “I hear you,” he said, yawning as he approached. “Say, did that package come in?”   
  
“Ah yeah, I put it in your nightstand. It was nice.”   
  
“Thanks,” Dan said. He joined Eddie in the kitchen half of the room and got himself a drink as well, and there was a comfortable silence between them for a few moments until Dan glanced over and happened to catch sight of Eddie’s massacred chest. “Woah, what the heck happened there?”   
  
Eddie glanced down, because he’d almost forgotten about it in the aftermath of the dream. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that was… Mr. B. Y’know I probably shouldn’t have tried picking him up.”   
  
Dan gave him an exaggerated grimace. “Yeah, probably not,” he agreed. “You know animals can tell when you’re scared of them, so, you know, if you ever have to pick him up again, just… try to keep calm.”   
  
“Noted,” Eddie replied, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation. Dan said his goodnights and went to bed, while Eddie took a quick shower. He winced as the hot water hit his scratches, but it felt nice too-- a soothing sort of pain, and wonderfully clean after the sickly memory of that dream. His heart was still beating fast and irregular as he thought about it, and he hoped this wasn’t going to set him back. He’d managed to avoid disaster today, but he knew he still wasn’t out of the woods. There was still Dan and Anne to deal with, their relationship and the likely changes in their living situation, not to mention Eddie’s own constant problems. He had to keep his head on straight and his heart calm if he wanted to get through everything and maybe back to some eventual semblance of normal.   
  
To that end, he got out of the shower, dried off (carefully patting his chest dry, but still scraping it a little too roughly), and went back to bed, knowing that a half-decent schedule was supposed to be the first step to maintaining whatever peace you might have in your life.   
  
He woke with a horrible feeling in his chest-- a sudden gripping of his heart and a shortness of breath, along with a wave of sick heat that shivered through him. He couldn’t move, but his arms and legs felt so _tense,_ like they were trying to run without his input. Struggling to snap out of whatever sleep paralysis he was in, he opened his eyes-- and found Mr. Belvedere laying on his chest, purring. Eddie let out the breath he was holding, ruffling the cat’s fur a little. Not the devil he was expecting; just one of his minions.   
  
“Alright, up,” he said, pushing the cat off of him. “Don’t you think you’ve done me enough damage in the past twenty four hours?”   
  
Mr. Belvedere refused to move of his own accord, just sliding off Eddie’s chest and onto his bed next to him, where he continued to purr as Eddie yawned and stretched, shaking his head as if to rid himself of the imagined pain his dream had conjured. There was still a heaviness in his chest though, even once it was free of cat. He coughed, thinking it was his lungs, but the odd feeling persisted. It wasn’t really stopping him from getting up or anything, so he slid out of bed and threw some clean sweatpants on and wandered into the kitchen for breakfast while he checked his phone.   
  
Over a bowl of cereal, he scrolled through messages, hoping that a few of them might be job offers, and being summarily disappointed when the grand majority were spam. But that was just how things went some days, so he tried not to let it get to him.   
  
He was rummaging around in the fridge for something more hearty (cereal was his go-to but it just wasn’t cutting it right now; he was hoping to find some bacon or something) when Dan came out and joined him in his breakfast search.   
  
“Morning,” he said cordially, and then… stared… in the general direction of Eddie’s chest, a look of consternation on his face. “Didn’t you have..?” He motioned vaguely at his own chest, and Eddie looked down in a hurry. The terrible cat scratches were gone. Gingerly he touched the spots he remembered them being; it didn’t hurt, not even a little bit.   
  
“Huh,” he said, looking up at Dan and grinning uneasily. “I guess that’s the power of modern medicine.”   
  
“Yeah, sure,” Dan said, obviously because he couldn’t think of anything else to say in the face of wounds he was clearly now wondering if he’d imagined the severity of. Eddie was wondering the same thing, although he remembered vividly how much they’d stung in the shower the night before, so he was _pretty sure_ he hadn’t imagined them being pretty darn bad.   
  
They shrugged it off, because there was really not much more they could do, and went about having breakfast. Eddie had cleaned up his cereal bowl before Dan had come out so the doctor didn’t judge him for going after a large plate of bacon and eggs. It was definitely more satisfying than the cereal, but it didn’t quite sate his hunger. He did his and Dan’s dishes feeling slightly irritable-- sort of hungry but nauseous at the same time.   
  
Eventually Dan left for an afternoon shift (Anne had gone into the firm much earlier, like normal), leaving Eddie to poke around the apartment, filled with an increasingly nervous energy, the source of which he couldn’t identify. Between bouts of cleaning and snacking, he found himself gravitating towards Mr. Belvedere, where he was perched on the couch or the kitchen counter or wherever. (Apparently Anne had decided it was okay to let him out into the apartment, since Eddie was pretty sure he hadn’t sleep-walked into their room and fetched him in the middle of the night.) Cautiously, he reached out to scratch the cat’s ears and rub down his back, and he was always filled with relief when Mr. B didn’t respond with violence.   
  
In fact, Mr. B seemed much more taken with him than he ever had before. Eddie guessed they must have inadvertently bonded, during yesterday’s rescue mission. On one hand, he didn’t especially care what some cat thought of him, but on the other hand it really was ...rather soothing, the cat’s purr. So when he wasn’t doing something else, the quiet afternoon found him holding Mr. Belvedere on his lap and coaxing the pleasant low vibrations out of him.   
  
After a few hours, though, a message pinged on Eddie’s phone, telling him he had an offer to do some background guitar recording for a studio across town. It had been a while since he’d done any music work, and being surrounded by an atmosphere of creativity tended to be a mood booster, so he responded that he’d be there within the hour, and gently set Mr. B aside so he could get ready. He dressed and grabbed his guitar in its case and slung it over his back, tidying up a few more things here and there as he headed out the door.   
  
Public transportation would’ve been fine at this time of day, but he opted to take his motorcycle anyway. Gas was sort of a hot commodity he couldn’t afford on a regular basis, but he was in the mood to indulge. The thrum of the bike’s motor calmed his nerves, vibrating up through him and into his heart, which still felt like there was a bit too much pressure on it.   
  
In the move to get up and go to the studio, he’d sort of forgotten the lingering hunger that had been pecking at him all morning, but as he passed through the restaurant district it was brought back to his attention. The smell of meat assaulted him (as much as an assault could be considered a pleasant thing) and he pulled over by the strongest of the smells, which was coming from a collection of street vendor’s kiosks. He couldn’t recall ever being so enticed by so many smells at once, and in the next few minutes he’d splurged and gotten himself a hot dog, a gyro, a kebab, and a chocolate-covered cannoli, responsibilities be damned. By the time he got to the studio, his stomach was feeling a little bit more satisfied, but still pretty unsettled.   
  
It didn’t help that his head started to ache as he entered the building. At first it was just a slight annoyance, an unpleasant tingling in the back of his head. Given that he could already hear the buzz of the sonic frequency remixed into most of what was recorded there, it didn’t surprise him to be in a little bit of discomfort. That was pretty par for the course when he hadn’t slept well, so he managed to ignore it for the most part, waving at the receptionist and taking the elevator up to one of the inner offices on the third floor while hopefully maintaining some kind of normal expression.   
  
“Hey Eddie,” the producer said when he came in, clapping his shoulder in greeting. It threw Eddie’s balance off a little, something in him wobbling at the sudden solid touch, but he stayed on his feet and responded in kind, though he took a slightly wider stance to account for the sudden imbalance.   
  
“Monty,” he replied with a friendly grin. “Haven’t seen you for, what, a year? Your usual backup call out sick or something?”   
  
Monty shrugged. “Yeah, y’know, it’s flu season. Didn’t want him to get the lead singer sick, so I told ‘im to come back for the next few tracks. The label just wanted to get this one out for a single before the month was up, and I figured you could use the job. Still livin’ with that ex of yours?”   
  
“For now,” Eddie said with a shrug of his own. He didn’t go into any more detail about his living situation, and Monty didn’t ask; that was the relationship he had with most people he worked with, and it suited them all alright, even though he knew it was kind of hollow. They chatted about mundane things and the usual city gossip as Monty got him set up in the recording booth, though after a few minutes the producer started to give him a curious look.   
  
“You’re lookin’ a little red,” he told Eddie, handing him a water bottle, which he gratefully took a long swig of. “You feelin’ alright? It’s not too hot in here for ya, is it?”   
  
Eddie shook his head; he didn’t want to bother the man with his headache or his upset stomach. It wasn’t _his_ fault he’d slept like shit last night. “Nah, I’m good,” he said, although the more he thought about it, he realized he _was_ feeling kind of warm. But it was as Monty said-- he could use the job, and he didn’t want to be sent home for being sick when it was probably just the usual organs-not-firing-on-all-cylinders. The recording session wouldn’t take more than a few hours, so he cleared his throat and settled in, ready to tough it out.   
  
Monty didn’t seem entirely convinced, but he knew and liked Eddie just well enough to take him at his word (especially when he needed the track finished). He retreated to the other side of the glass screen and switched on all the appropriate recording tech. It buzzed to life, and Eddie picked up his guitar to play a test run of the track. It was a decent song, even if it wasn’t his favorite genre. (That was how work was sometimes; you couldn’t always hold out for masterpieces.) He plucked out the notes slowly, getting a feel for the tune. The vibrations of it reverberated in him, through his chest, in a pleasant way that seemed to make the constant ache fade back somewhat. It wasn’t so bad really, but he doubted this particular singer would want to keep an acoustic version, so as soon as he felt he had it down enough not to glue his eyes to the sheet music, he plugged in the amp and switched the pedal on, ratcheting the knob up to the disruptor frequency.   
  
He wasn’t three notes in before his stomach, head, and heart all gave a great lurch and he doubled over his guitar, half falling to the floor.   
  
The crackle of the intercom sounded, and Monty’s worried voice came on. “Woah, Eddie, what’s up? You okay?”   
  
He groaned in pain, nausea wracking his core. A shiver ran through him, cold and hot at the same time, and his tongue suddenly felt very heavy in his mouth. Clamping his jaw shut in case his stomach rioted again, he slowly sat back up and wiped his brow.   
  
“I’m, I’m fine,” he called once the intense discomfort subsided slightly, waving listlessly at Monty, who stared at him with a grimace from the other side of the glass. He could see that the producer was a hair’s breadth away from stopping the session, so Eddie shook his head and took a deep breath, picking up his guitar to try again.   
  
But as his fingers were just about to pluck at the strings, he thought very strongly, _‘No more.’_ The words echoed through his head in a deep, dark tone that sounded not unlike being yelled at while underwater. He wasn’t in the habit of arguing with himself, so he slowly laid the guitar down across his knees. Yeah, maybe it was better if he didn’t. After all, Monty was still looking at him with that supremely worried expression, biting the inside of his lip. Sighing, Eddie shook his head and put his guitar back in its case.   
  
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said to Monty, speaking up to be heard over the intercom. “Yeah I’m not feeling so hot after all. Probably the same thing your other backup came down with.”   
  
“I thought so,” Monty said, coming around to hold the door open for him (but staying a little further away than he might normally). He looked at Eddie warily, eyes glancing around his face as if he thought he might find something there. “Why don’t you go home and rest then? I’ll… try to find some more work for ya later in the month, alright?”   
  
Nodding, Eddie led the way out into the hall towards the elevator. “Thanks. Sorry to leave you hanging like this. I just, y’know, I didn’t sleep real well last night, so I probably just need some rest to work out whatever’s in my system.”   
  
Monty’s expression was still concerned, verging on scared, as he saw Eddie out. “Right, of course. Yeah, just… get some rest. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”   
  
He wasn’t pleased that he wouldn’t be getting paid for the day’s trip across town, but despite that, Eddie actually felt a lot better once he was back outside. The air was cooler and fresher, and the whine of the city was unpredictable but it had a low thrum that was overall comforting.   
  
Of course then the hunger struck again. He thought about what they had at home; none of it sounded appealing. None of it sounded… _hearty_ enough. Although he didn’t have much cash left in his wallet, he hopped back on his bike and headed for the grocery store. _‘Yes. Shop. Meat,’_ he thought, the idea echoing from the depths of his head.   
  
The store wasn’t too busy at that time of day, which was lucky because Eddie found himself kind of zoning out as he made his way to the meat counter, his spacial awareness less than ideal for navigating crowds. It was just that his head was feeling sort of foggy, and combined with the nauseous hunger pain that was spreading through his whole abdomen instead of staying confined to his stomach, he didn’t really have the attention for not bumping into people. Despite the way his head was swimming, thoughts vibrating darkly and quietly around in his brain like ripples in a shadowy pool of water, he managed to buy a couple of slabs of steak and some sausages that were on sale, and check out without incident.   
  
The drive home cleared his head a little; if he weren’t starving, he thought he’d probably want to keep driving, at least until the sunset came and cooled off the heat that was rising under his skin. The allure of his purchases was just too strong though; even through the packaging, even raw, he swore he could distinctly smell them.   
  
_‘Hungry,’_ his watery thoughts said, and he focused on getting home.   
  
The apartment was dark inside, the blinds all drawn down; nobody else had come home yet. He didn’t bother opening them; it was early enough that the shaded sunlight still lit the room in a twilight sort of glow. Setting his guitar down on the couch, perhaps a little more roughly than he meant to, he took the grocery bag to the kitchen counter and hurriedly rummaged for a pan.   
  
_‘Don’t bother,’_ he thought, but that didn’t make sense to him, so he continued setting up the cast-iron on the stovetop, then unwrapping the first steak and dropping it in hastily, as if he couldn’t stand to hold it any longer. He turned the heat up to _whatever_ setting; at this point he didn’t really care how it cooked as long as it was edible.   
  
_‘Edible now,’_ he thought, reaching for it, but he pulled back. No, it hadn’t been on the pan for more than twenty seconds and he hadn’t even flipped it yet. Instead he reached for the salt and pepper, even though he couldn’t help thinking, _‘Don’t need it.’_   
  
Muscles tense, he crossed his arms and tapped his fingers, desperate to turn the steak already, but he made sure to give it at least a good thirty-count before he reached in with his bare hand and flipped it.   
  
_‘It’s done,’_ his thoughts said, but he shook his head at himself, because it clearly _wasn’t_ done. It was still raw. _‘It’s fine,’_ he thought, but getting food poisoning was not on his to-do list today, so he clamped his hands around his arms and forced himself to wait, even as an irritated growl crawled up out of his throat.   
  
Finally he couldn’t wait any longer, and as the steak had started to at least turn a little pink instead of dripping dark red, he grabbed it up out of the hot pan, heedless of the heat (which he barely felt-- possibly because it hadn’t had the time to get that hot, he thought with a dark, self-deprecating laugh), and took a big bite out of it, ripping off a large mouthful of barely-cooked beef. It was easily the rarest steak he’d ever had, but it was deliciously satisfying and now he was wondering if maybe he’d been missing out all his life, cooking his food to a disgraceful _medium_ and wasting time all the while.   
  
Since the sub-rare steak had been such a success, Eddie didn’t protest when some instinct in him told him to take a bite out of the next one completely raw-- although his stomach did.   
  
_‘Eat it!’_ his brain thought at him as he spit the chunk out, the cold and sharp tangy taste just too much for him.   
  
“Ugh, no,” he responded, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away bloody. “What the hell am I doing? I can’t be _that_ hungry.” Shuddering, he threw the steak on the pan and listened to it sizzle as he turned away from it, hoping to curb the desire to snatch it back up again.   
  
_‘Yes we are,’_ his thoughts said, dark and echoey but much less distant than before, now that he’d had something to eat and was in the safety of his own home.   
  
Shaking his head, he stalked over to the fridge and pulled it open to find a snack for while the steak cooked. He reached for an apple, but stopped mid-way. _‘Bleh, not that,’_ he thought, so he looked around for something else. Cheese? Better, but he felt there was something else he’d rather have. Beer? No, useless. A whole-ass potato? Something about it sounded appealing, but he continued searching until his eyes crossed a box of fancy chocolate truffles, and there was an electric feeling in his brain like physical wires being connected, correlating the picture of the little dark chocolates on the box with an exquisite taste and a bodily sense of euphoria that followed.   
  
They were Anne’s chocolates… but he was sure she wouldn’t mind if he _borrowed_ just a few…   
  
The first little sphere was heavenly, melting over his tongue and feeling like it was seeping straight into his brain, a flavor that was wonderfully warm despite the chocolate’s refrigerated chill. The second one he bit into, scooping out the creamy soft insides with his tongue before eating the other half of the shell; the experience was somehow visceral, reminding him of something he couldn’t place but which gave him a serious sense of satisfaction, like a predator digging into its prey. The third and fourth chocolates were good too, but he stopped himself before he could have a fifth. No need to get Anne on his case about eating all her probably-imported candies, particularly when there was still a steak to be eaten. He put the truffles box back and closed the fridge, and, feeling comfortably sated as if in a foodie afterglow, he took the time to get out a plate for the steak instead of chowing down with the hot slab of meat grasped between his hands. (And it should be suitably hot this time.)   
  
It had grilled up to a medium on one side, but the other was still rare, so he was going to flip it over to sear the other surface, but an impatient, petulant feeling in the back of his head made him shrug and drag the steak onto his plate as it was.   
  
_‘Cook the other one while we eat this,’_ he thought, but the chocolate seemed to have mellowed out the severity of his hunger, so it wasn’t a strong enough thought to be unable to resist, and instead he wrapped the third steak up and stuck it in the fridge with the sausage. Two steaks (on top of the chocolates and all the snacks he’d had only an hour before) were more than enough for one meal, even if he did have the flu or something. ( _‘We’re not sick,’_ he thought, feeling a bit annoyed. Maybe. Maybe not. He wasn’t sure. He definitely didn’t feel normal though…)   
  
Eating a steak with fork and knife, as society tended to prefer, was not as viscerally satisfying as ripping it up with his teeth, but it definitely took a little longer which at least increased the time he got to enjoy it. He felt comfortably sleepy by the time he was done, and he was barely able to wrangle enough energy to put his dishes in the sink before he began to wander off towards his room for a nap. He was in the doorway though, when a thought wiggled into his brain like a worm up out of damp soil: _‘Get the cat. Warm. Vibrations nice.’_ And as much as he hadn’t ever gotten along with Mr. B before, Eddie couldn’t argue that the cat’s purr was soothing.   
  
“Mr. B,” he called out into the apartment, and he only had to wait a few moments before the little creature slithered out from under the coffee table and came to sit down in front of him. Eddie yawned as he bent down to pick him up and tuck him to his chest (the cat scratches from the day before forgotten). Nudging the door mostly shut behind him, he kicked off his shoes and collapsed into the bed, falling to sleep to the sound of Mr. Belvedere’s comforting purrs. 


	4. Chapter 4

When he woke, he was confused and disoriented for several reasons. For one thing, he could still feel the dark tendrils of his dream holding on to him, and it was hard to wake from it. It had been… such a strange and realistic dream, for all that the content had been some sci-fi nonsense he didn’t usually get involved with. He didn’t watch or read science fiction, but this dream had clearly taken him to the far reaches of space, some nightmarish planet. It was rocky, and the sky was a rusty red, and Eddie (or whoever he’d been in his dream) was surrounded by a crowd of souls caught in endless agony, constantly grabbing at him, reaching, grasping for something that was always out of reach. The more he thought about it, the more he thought maybe it had been hell, but something in him still thought it was supposed to have been space.  
  
He’d been dragged deep into the pit of despair and when he finally woke and found he was safe in his bed instead, it took him a long moment to realize it was reality.  
  
And then he realized the reason he’d woke was because Anne was at his door. He didn’t understand, but her name crossed his sleeping mind in an insistent, sort of worried tone. He opened his eyes mere moments before there was a knock at his door, and he didn’t realize he had been thinking about her until he called, “Come in,” and she opened it just enough to stick her head in.  
  
She looked worried. “Eddie… Have you seen Mr. Belvedere?”  
  
His first instinct was to say no, because normally he didn’t see Mr. B all that much, but then he realized that the cat was still snuggled up to his chest, but under the covers now. “Yeah, he’s, uh…” He pulled the covers down to reveal him. “He’s here.”  
  
Relief flooded Anne’s face and she sighed. “Oh, good, okay. It’s just, Mrs. Baker next door caught me on my way in just now and she said she saw him get out today.”  
  
_‘Busted,’_ his treacherous brain thought at him, almost laughing. But he brushed it aside and opted to feign nonchalance. “It was yesterday, actually, but yeah, I had to chase him a little.” He shrugged as casually as he could, given that he was still mostly laying down.  
  
“He didn’t get into any trouble out there, did he?” she asked, looking concerned. She looked like she wanted to come scoop him up and check him for scrapes, but didn’t want to intrude on Eddie’s space. (Normally they stayed out of each others’ rooms; they still loved each other in their way but getting buddy-buddy like that would have been a little too weird, with their history.)  
  
Eddie shook his head, noticing that it still felt heavy. “Nah,” he said, giving the cat a pet and eliciting a pleased meow from him. “He, uh, he seems better than ever.”  
  
Cocking her head, Anne looked at him (or them) curiously. “Yeah, he’s never really liked you much before. Maybe you dragging him home was sort of a way of asserting dominance?”  
  
_‘Saved him,’_ he thought, though what he said with a lofty shrug was, “Who knows?” He nudged Mr. B, who grudgingly got up from his cozy spot against Eddie’s side, stretching and yawning before he jumped down and trotted out into the hall.  
  
“So how far did he go anyway?”  
  
“Just a little ways,” Eddie replied vaguely. He yawned and stretched in an exaggerated fashion, hoping Anne would invite herself to leave so he could finish waking from his awful nap.  
  
She took the hint, though she stayed just long enough to tell him, “Oh, Dan’s taking me out for dinner tonight. Can you feed Mr. B in a few hours?”  
  
“Sure,” Eddie said, waving her off. She left, and closed the door behind her, and Eddie collapsed back onto the bed, feeling more drained than when he laid down in the first place. He was glad Anne wasn’t upset that Mr. B had gotten out, though he knew she was going to be a little tense for the next week or two, worrying that someone had seen him.  
  
He sighed, feeling tired. Now that he wasn’t distracted by Anne, he was becoming more aware of his body, and it _ached._ It felt like he’d spent several hours at the gym-- even though that was something he hadn’t done for years. He guessed that was pretty par for the course for the flu though, so he pushed himself up out of bed and went out for a drink of water, ignoring the voice in his head that protested, _‘Not sick,’_ since it was clearly in denial. Yeah, he wished he wasn’t sick because then he might be able to go work, but if his head kept swimming like this then there was no way he was going to be able to do much of anything.  
  
_‘Eat. Rest,’_ his thoughts told him. _‘You will feel better soon.’_  
  
Mm, he figured that was true enough.  
  
The living room was lit better than when he’d left it, Anne or Dan having turned on some lights when they got home, and the glare of them made his head ache a little more than it had before, sort of like he had a hangover. (He didn't think you could get a hangover from rare meat though and it'd been years since he'd drank heavily. He was _trying, really._ ) Groaning, he turned away from the soft light of the lamps and wandered into the kitchen, where he drank about three glasses of water before he went to collapse on the couch.

His guitar was still leaning against the arm of the sofa, in its case with the strap draped over the backrest.

_'Play. Soft.'_

Eddie unzipped it and cradled the instrument in his lap as he curled up, stroking his fingers along the rough strings. “Well I'm definitely not gonna play rough,” he said, laughing quietly. He remembered how sick the disruptor frequencies had made him feel earlier. Anyway, his pedal was under his bed somewhere and he had no incentive to go dig it out, and without that his guitar was as non-sonic as the day it was born, back in the days before anyone had thought of modifying them in such a way.  
  
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and slowly picked at the strings to the tune of a song that had been old long before he had started getting there. Humming the vocals, he played a soft, down-tempo version of the song, feeling the chords’ vibrations as they gently shook the guitar and his body where the two rested together.  
  
_‘Good sound,’_ the watery voice in his head said, sounding a little more solid now. _‘Stabilizing. Nice.’_  
  
“Yeah, it’s not bad, is it?”  
  
He played a good while longer, whiling the next hour away with whatever melodies came to mind-- some of them his favorites from back before music was a weapon, some powerless versions of songs he’d been hired to play or were popular on the radio. A few were his own little creations, simple four-chord strains or patchwork combinations of things he’d probably heard here or there. He felt his heart patter in a strange but comfortable way as he lost himself to the music. He’d lulled himself almost into a sleeplike trance, fingers lightly strumming in long-remembered patterns as he nearly dozed, when he became aware again of Anne approaching from behind the couch. Her name echoed through his head and pulled him back to consciousness.  
  
“That’s pretty,” she said, standing over him and gazing down with a soft expression. “Don’t think I’ve heard that one before. Is it one of yours?”  
  
_‘She likes it,’_ his internal voice said, sounding pleased and a bit surprised, almost preening, proud.  
  
“Uh, yeah,” Eddie said, warm color rising in his cheeks a little. “I, uh, just came up with it.” He didn’t know how, but now that he thought about it, he realized it definitely wasn’t anything he’d heard before (as far as he was aware, though he knew how that worked sometimes).  
  
_‘We.’_  
  
“Well it’s nice,” Anne said with a decisive nod. “Maybe you should write it down or record it, so you don’t forget it.”  
  
_‘We won’t forget.’_ _  
__  
_ “We won’t forget it,” Eddie parroted, not realizing what he’d said until Anne raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean, I’ll probably remember it. But, yeah, thanks. Good idea.”  
  
Anne leaned over slightly, just a very slight almost-imperceptible amount, and glanced around the room, as if checking that Eddie didn’t have a girlfriend or something hiding on the other side of the couch from where she stood. (And it wasn’t as if they had any rules against that; if Eddie _wanted_ to bring someone home he absolutely could. He just never had before, and he knew Anne would be considerably surprised.) But when she didn’t find anyone hiding, she straightened back up and very distinctly _didn’t_ give him a shrug. He was grateful she didn’t call to question his spontaneous change in personal pronoun, since he didn’t have a good answer to give her for why he’d done it, except that the flu was making him weird.  
  
“Well,” she said, clearing her throat. “I’m about to head out. Dan’s meeting me downtime in half an hour, after he gets off from his shift. I’m not sure when we’ll be home, so just please remember to feed Mr. Belvedere for me. And--” She gave him a patronizing look, though it did hold a sense of humor to it. “--try not to let him out again. I don’t wanna have to give you both a bath.”  
  
“Ha ha,” Eddie replied sarcastically. “Yeah, I’ll be sure to tuck him in and read him a bedtime story.”  
  
“Good,” Anne said, turning away and smirking. “Make it a nice mushy love story. He’s a romantic at heart.”  
  
Eddie was far more likely to believe that now than he would have been a few days ago, given how the cat had taken to cuddling up on him, but he laughed and hummed in agreement as she fetched her purse and keys and left him to the silence of the apartment.  
  
Again, with nothing else to focus on, his other feelings and senses began to return to him, not least of which was his hunger. There was still the third steak and the sausage he’d bought earlier, and though the more responsible part of him could feel his wallet crying at the thought of eating so much expensive meat in one day (and it was definitely pricier now than it had been _before,_ given the extra effort it took to guard livestock and farmers from zombie attacks), he went ahead and began frying them up because the craving was building back up again and it was making him queasy. (At least his head didn’t hurt at the moment.)  
  
_‘Don’t cook so long this time.’_  
  
He scoffed at the impatient thought. He wasn’t _that_ hungry. He was pretty sure he could wait ten minutes for dinner if it meant not getting salmonella.  
  
_‘Won’t get sick. Stop worrying.’_  
  
Maybe that was true. Chances of getting sick from raw foods were pretty slim if they were kept refrigerated. Still, cooking your damn food was the civilized thing to do, so that was his intention. Having the flu didn’t give him full leave to act like a heathen.  
  
_‘Don’t have the flu. Just eat the steak. We’re wasting it.’_  
  
He didn’t know when or why he’d developed such a preference for rare meats, but he shrugged it off. It probably wasn’t that odd for your tastes to change when you got sick, so he rolled with it (to the degree of only cooking the steak to rare; he wasn’t planning on going full-raw again no matter how hungry he might get. He wasn’t a damn animal).  
  
There was a feeling like an exasperated sigh in the back of his mind, and something about it amused him greatly. It kind of reminded him of his years reporting for the school papers, and how annoyed people would get when you ignored their carefully crafted answer in favor of chasing your own thread.  
  
To buffer his craving, he threw some tater tots in the toaster oven and let them heat up while he salted and peppered the steak and seared it to medium-rare perfection.  
  
_‘That’s not meat,’_ his thoughts echoed when he shook the pan to get the tots distributed evenly.  
  
“I like things that aren’t meat sometimes,” Eddie said, although he knew that nutritionally speaking, tater tots were not exactly high on the list. He wondered if he should supplement the steak with something like salad instead, but his stomach apparently disliked the idea; it lurched slightly, as if nauseous at the mere thought of greenery. (He’d never been _real_ fond of salad before, but he didn’t hate it either.)  
  
There was a sense of something like… maybe anxiety, bouncing around in him, as he finished cooking everything and put it onto a plate so he could maintain some semblance of propriety. As appalled as he was at the thought of eating tater tots with a fork, given that they were actually _supposed to be_ finger foods, that was exactly what he did. He couldn’t say why, but he was feeling a bit silly and contrarian, his annoyance over his inability to control his health manifesting in his decision to do whatever ridiculous thing he _could_ do.  
  
_‘Annoying,’_ he thought, and although he was perfectly fine with getting on his own nerves, because honestly, that was something he’d come to terms with over the years, especially since everything had changed, he suddenly became anxious over the thought that if he wasn’t careful, Anne and Dan would start to get fed up with him as well. And these days, that was something he really couldn’t afford, with the threat of them dropping him like a hot potato looming ever closer.  
  
“Well…” He tapped his fork against his plate as irritation washed over him. (Or maybe the noise was making him irritated; he wasn’t sure which direction it was going.) “Better to take out all my annoying habits on myself instead of taking them out on someone else.”  
  
Even as he said it, he didn’t quite agree with the assessment, but there was the distinct sensation of him (metaphorically) biting his own tongue. _‘Let’s eat,’_ he thought instead.  
  
The steak was about as good as he expected ( _‘Cooked too long!’_ ), and there was some lingering apprehension about the tater tots, but somehow he found he enjoyed them way more than he expected to. With the sausage as a second course, and a single truffle from Anne’s stash ( _‘Have chocolate._ No, they’re Anne’s. _Just one!_ Ugh, fine. Hopefully she won’t mind.’), dinner was appropriately satisfying, and it left his stomach finally feeling normal again, if only for a little while. While things were settled, he took the opportunity to do some chores.  
  
_‘Wouldn’t need to do dishes if you didn’t cook,’_ he thought at himself.  
  
“Right,” he replied. “And I wouldn’t need to eat if I just _died,_ but y’know, I think I’ll keep eating for now.”  
  
_‘Food is the best part of living.’_  
  
Eddie hummed. He definitely did like eating-- especially lately. He finished off the dishes in a pretty cheerful mood and then went to scoop Mr. B’s litter box, wrinkling his nose at it but knowing that if there was one chore he could do to really keep in Anne’s good graces, this was it. Afterwards he vacuumed the living room carpet, but quit partway through when his head started pounding.  
  
_‘Stop. Bad noise. It hurts us.’_  
  
Groaning, Eddie returned the vacuum to its resting place in the closet. “Yeah, but why?” he asked, expecting anything but a coherent answer.  
  
_‘Our connection is not stable yet.’_  
  
Hand on the closet doorknob, Eddie froze. A shiver ran through him, chasing after some incoherent half-story that showed in his head, flickering like an ancient projection on a moth-eaten screen (which was his brain, in this metaphor). There were scenes from the last few days-- Eddie staring at himself from several yards away on a cracked and faded suburban street; spikes of pain during disruptively loud moments, Eddie clawing at himself to get in, to get to safety; a feeling of euphoria at finding his match, sadness at finding him damaged by the actions of another; that ever-present hunger, desperate now to feed not just himself but _themselves;_ a sense of comfort in the gentle melody of his guitar, at the merging of minds to create a lovely new sound; and then the image of Eddie standing stock-still in the kitchen where he was at this very moment, viewed both from within and without. And following that, something like a diagram of himself, glowing in health but with a dark thread woven all throughout him, his wounds stitched up in sticky black, heart beating strong but not alone.  
  
He wasn’t alone. Through every scene there was a murky essence clinging to him, holding tight and tighter, seeping in and slowly filling all the gaps.  
  
“Oh god, how sick am I?” he asked out into the quiet of the apartment, though he knew already that this was not something his own brain would come up with, no matter how sick he was. This other essence didn’t even have to tell him.  
  
_‘You are_ not _sick. You are healing.’_   
  
Eddie shook, and he looked around the room. No. No, there wasn’t anyone there, and that wasn’t his own thought. “This isn’t me,” he whispered to himself.  
  
_‘It is_ we, _Eddie.’_ The thought echoed through his brain and he whirled around and stormed for the bathroom, flicking on the lights and staring at himself in the mirror. He ran a hand through his hair, gripped at his scalp, pressed his eyes, shook his head.  
  
Was the meat too undercooked? Maybe it was some new strain of flu. Maybe he’d gotten cat scratch fever when Mr. Belvedere had assaulted him the day before. Maybe…  
  
His brain growled at him, frustrated.  
  
Right. Feeding the cat. He’d told Anne he’d feed the cat. Forcing his steps to be even and calm, Eddie went back into the kitchen and took out the chicken for Mr. B’s dinner. His hands shook as he chopped it up into kitty bite-size pieces, and when the blade slipped the sharp knife sliced right into his finger. He dropped the knife and it clattered on the ground, narrowly missing his toes. Hissing, he sucked his finger into his mouth on instinct, licking the blood clean.  
  
“Oh yeah, that’s how to get salmonella,” he muttered, cringing at himself and the metallic taste on his tongue, hating that he didn’t hate it. But as he looked down at his fresh new wound, the damage simply ceased to be, closing up smooth and steady like a time-lapse.  
  
If it was possible to pluck his own finger off his hand and throw it across the room, that’s probably what he would have done. As it was, he flinched back, slipping on the knife on the floor, and landed on his ass on the kitchen tile, knocking his head against the cabinet doors.   
  
_‘Stop,’_ his thoughts said, as if exasperated with Eddie’s sudden predilection with hurting himself.  
  
“No, _you_ stop!” he yelled. “What the hell is happening? Did I imagine that? Did I lose time?!” He was pretty sure he hadn’t just stood there and stared at that cut for the, what?, _week_ it would normally take to heal.  
  
It was extremely disconcerting, but he was aware just then of the way that the new bruises on his ass and head that he’d just given himself were fading, the pain disappearing and leaving the areas entirely unaffected.  
  
_‘Be calm,’_ his thoughts rang. _‘We will heal faster if you rest.’_  
  
But calm was the exact opposite of what Eddie was feeling now (finally, as he could tell the feeling had been steadily building). “We? What is this ‘we’? Who are you?”  
  
Mentally, the essence seemed to shake its head, as if it thought that was a stupid question. _‘I am you.’_  
  
Eddie laughed, just a derisive, stunted noise. “No. Like hell _you’re me._ _I’m_ me. I didn’t sign up for any new alternate personalities.” The doctors hadn’t diagnosed him with schizophrenia or anything, but he was wondering if maybe he ought to get them to check for it anyway, see if that damage was manifesting new problems, those broken pathways or misfiring synapses or whatever.  
  
_‘I am… we?’_ it tried.  
  
Something in his brain snapped, rigidly trying to realign his thought processes again. “That’s not grammatically correct,” he told it idly, picking himself up off the floor and putting the knife in the sink where he was less likely to hurt himself with it. His hands were still shaking; his arms, and his legs too. His whole core was tense. “Dinner time, Mr. B!” he called out into the apartment.  
  
The cat came running and leapt up onto the counter, purring as he ate his food. Eddie reached out and smoothed a hand through the feline’s fur, the gentle vibrations of its pleasure slowly easing the tension out of him.  
  
_‘Good creature. It makes a pleasant noise.’_ _  
__  
_ Where the voice had once been distant and watery, easy to ignore, it now echoed straight into his brain, as if someone was speaking into his ear (but without the ticklish feeling; or at least, it wasn’t quite the same). Trying to keep his composure, Eddie reached around on his body and started patting himself down, wondering if someone had slapped a bug on him somewhere. Chest, underarms, arms, back, between his shoulder blades, on his neck, behind his ear, maybe on his elbow? In a pocket? Caught in his hair? But there was nothing, nothing there.  
  
_‘Look deeper,’_ the voice said, softly mocking him.  
  
“I don’t recall giving anyone the opportunity to stick anything up my ass recently,” Eddie said in response. What he got for his troubles was a curious feeling in his brain and an even _more_ curious sensation in the pit of his stomach that left him half-queasy. Shivering, he stalked off to his bed room to find his phone, ready to call his doctor, or text an old friend, or check his email, or do anything to distract himself.  
  
Right, the doctor. Maybe Anne was more right than he’d initially thought; maybe they really had changed his medication without telling him, and he was having a bad reaction to it.  
  
_‘Wrong.’_  
  
“I’m not asking you,” he told the voice. “I’m specifically not asking you, because of course a figment of my imagination is going to try to convince me it’s real.” Huffing angrily, he poked through his phone for the number to his doctor’s office, but as he was about to press dial, he jerked and tossed his phone away. It skidded on the floor out into the hallway.  
  
_‘Not a figment. We are very real.’_  
  
Eddie stalked over to the phone and bent to pick it up, but when his fingers tried to close around it-- they wouldn’t. “God damn it,” he said, shaking, mad at himself and this… this disease, this whatever it was. He lunged for it again but his leg came out and kicked it away, entirely without his telling it to do so. “Ughhh, just… let me…” He threw all of his weight down, hoping to fall on top of the phone, but somehow it had moved out of range by the time he hit the floor. 

“This is… _stupid,”_ he grit out between clenched teeth. 

‘You _are stupid,’_ the voice in his head told him, sounding as childishly petulant as Eddie felt. _‘You know what we are.’_

Struggling against the heavy weight of his limbs, trying desperately to crawl towards where his phone sat several impossible feet away, he huffed, trying to catch his breath. “A hallucination. Toxoplasmosis from the cat litter?” 

_‘Incorrect,’_ the voice said, and he was weighed down even further. 

Eddie groaned. A dream. A hallucination. Something. He didn't want to think about it. “Just let me up!” he yelled, grabbing on to the leg of the end table and jerking himself towards it. The lamp sitting on it wobbled and toppled over, crashing against the coffee table and shattering loudly as he tried to haul himself to his feet. 

_‘Calm down. We need to rest.’_

Standing on shaky legs, Eddie took one uneven step towards the phone. “No, what ‘we’ need is to go to the hospital. Because I'm clearly having some sort of psychotic episode!” 

A wide-eyed terror struck him as a montage of half-remembered stories and rumors flitted through his head, a horrible sonic whine and people screaming in pain as-- 

No. 

“I need help,” he said plaintively, panting as he took another step. 

_‘They will only hurt us. You know this.’_

Eddie staggered forward another step, even as something continued to drag him back and down. “Hey, just shut up, would you?” he growled, clutching the arm of a nearby chair and falling against it with most of his weight. The chair rocked and fell backwards into a heavy shelf lined with imposing textbooks, knocking half the collection onto the floor, and several into his head. 

“Augh, god _damn_ it!” he yelled, but the pain only lasted a moment, his head and bruised shoulders clearing to normal almost immediately. 

_‘This is not how you heal.’_

Eddie scoffed. “Right, a hallucination would know what's best for me.” 

_‘What's best for_ us _,’_ it countered. 

The phone was almost within reach, and once he had it he could call… someone. Someone who could help him. Maybe not the hospital, but… Dan. Dan was a doctor. He wasn't _Eddie's_ doctor, but he would probably know what was going on with him, maybe even how to make it stop. 

_‘Do not tell them._ ’ 

“Right, sure won't,” Eddie lied, reaching for the phone. Even with the heavy weight on his limbs that made basic movement feel like swimming through molasses, he managed to get his hand on the phone for a split second-- before it was ripped out of his hand by an elastic black tendril that sprouted from the back of his forearm and flung it at the nearest wall. The crack of the glass breaking in an intricate spiderweb pattern was drowned out by Eddie's horrified scream.   
  
“Holy shit, what the fuck is that?!”  
  
As if he hadn’t learned from his past, he flinched back, hitting his head against some piece of furniture or another. He didn’t really feel it though, too busy shaking his arm wildly, trying to dislodge the tentacle from his skin (to no avail).  
  
_‘You know. We don’t have to tell you.’_  
  
No, no, he didn’t know. He didn’t. He had no- no idea--  
  
“Get off!” he yelled, grabbing the black tendril with his other hand and yanking hard-- only to lose his balance and fall once more, knocking yet another table or chair to the ground with a loud clatter, because the _thing_ had disappeared, falling through his fingers like warm, fleshy sand.  
  
“Oh god, Jesus Christ, where did you go?!” Frantically, he turned around, trying to look over his shoulder at his back, his legs, anywhere the tendril might have relocated to. All that resulted in was making himself dizzy, and he staggered into the wall, thumping hard against it.  
  
_‘Do you know?’_ the voice asked, sounding a little smug. _‘Know what we are?’_  
  
“This isn’t happening,” Eddie murmured, shuddering violently, still glancing about for more signs of the black goo. “This is-- this has gotta be a dream. Some… dream, some nightmare.”  
  
When he didn’t find the tentacle, he looked again for the next most important thing-- his phone, which he dove for, hoping to god it was still working. But before he could reach it, again he was held back, this time attached to the nearest bookshelf with thick black ropes that sprouted from the entire back side of him.  
  
His teeth chattered as he was held there, shaking from head to toe. “God, please, what the hell do you want from me?”  
  
There was a silence for a moment that was only tense because Eddie was on the verge of hyperventilating, and then the voice responded, _‘A permanent host.’_  
  
Eddie laughed, the sound incredulous and sarcastic and not a _little_ hysterical. “Is that right? Well I hope you have a really loose definition of permanent, because I doubt you’ll be able to wring more than a week from me. One of you assholes already did a number on me, so I don’t have a whole lot left to give.”  
  
Sighing, he felt… sort of a sense of peace fall over him, and he was relieved to realize it was entirely his own. It came from finally admitting it aloud, giving in to his mortality. It was a significant weight off his shoulders.  
  
But the voice seemed to shake its head, inside his. _‘We are healing that damage,’_ it told him, and he could feel it poking at his heart a little, sewing him up with thick stitches even he could notice.  
  
“Well…” Eddie swallowed thickly. “G-great. Hey, good for you. That’ll give you, what?, another few days maybe? Congratulations.”  
  
_‘We will have much longer than that,’_ the voice said, and a little black tentacle sprouted from somewhere on his chest and came up to gently touch his face. Eddie tried to cringe away from it, but he was held tightly in place and just had to hold his breath as it caressed his cheek. It was strangely warm, alive, and the texture was much less slimy than he expected-- than he _remembered._  
  
“So you’ll just kill me slowly,” he whispered, keeping still and looking at the inky black tendril out of the corner of his eye. “Great. That’s wonderful.”  
  
_‘Never,’_ it said adamantly. _‘We will protect. Always.’_  
  
There was such a heartfelt emotion behind that assertion that despite the fear gripping him tight, Eddie almost believed it. He just didn’t understand _why._ “Right. Until you find a better host,” he said.  
  
_‘There is no one better,’_ the voice said, and somehow it made it sound more like a compliment than the concession he’d have taken it for if anyone else had said it. _‘You are the one we were looking for.’_  
  
He could see it then, another patchwork story being played in his mind. This one didn’t have many clear pictures, more emotion than anything, but Eddie could feel the progression of it. It was an endless search, and constant hunger and desperation, seeking endlessly for that _one thing,_ that one _person,_ jumping from one terrible ill-fitting host to the next, devouring them because it was all he could do to survive until he found his… home.  
  
And he had found it, found it in a skittish human who didn’t even want to _think_ about him, let alone accept him.  
  
It was quite sad.  
  
That didn’t mean Eddie wasn’t still _terrified,_ especially because he wasn’t sure if he should believe that. Just because it was in his head didn’t make it trustworthy. In a way, that made him more suspicious of it.  
  
“How do I know?” he asked, his posture falling a bit more loose; he was still scared, but now that he had a better understanding of what was happening (and an acceptance; that was important) he wasn’t as petrified. The information he was gathering helped put his brain into more of an investigative mode, where he knew there was a story to be had, a truth to learn, and his own personal well-being took a back burner. (In this case, the truth was directly related to his personal well-being, but being able to separate himself from it helped.)  
  
The voice seemed to cock its head. _‘Can’t you feel it?’_  
  
Instinctively, Eddie’s answer was no, because all he could feel right now was the lingering effects of terror, but he took a moment to analyze the situation instead. _Feel_ it, huh? In… what? He took a deep breath and tried to feel. Of course there was the disconcerting feeling of being attached to the wall by the stringy body of this… thing, but he knew that wasn’t what it meant. Further in, he thought maybe he could feel it swarming under his skin-- seething, but… gently. It wasn’t an immediately noticeable sensation, but it was there. Yet deeper, he made himself consciously aware of his heart and his other organs; their damage had never been all that obvious, but there was a certain off-beat tick to the way his heart had beat the past years and now… it did feel different. Smoother, stronger. More secure.  
  
None of that meant anything though; it didn’t answer his questions, and he was going to say so when he…  
  
Well, it was hard to say. He didn’t really understand it himself. But there was a feeling… A feeling of… symmetry? Sympathy? It was… like an echo on his heartbeat, much different from the irregular pulsing of it he’d become used to, and he didn’t know how to say it, but it felt like it… matched. Like with every beat his heart gave it followed, chasing through his blood like it belonged. And not like a virus, which thought it belonged wherever it landed just because it could survive there. More like some kind of pilgrim, who had had that destination in its heart all along. It rejoiced at finding its holy land.  
  
Kind of silly, to let himself be thought of as some kind of mecca, but it was the metaphor his heart gave him… which was extra embarrassing.  
  
He sighed, and leaned his head back against the wall.  
  
_‘You do feel it?’_ the voice asked, sounding hopeful.  
  
Clearing his throat, Eddie finally admitted as much as he was comfortable with. “I don’t know that you’re not full of shit about the whole ‘looking for a home’ thing, but… you don’t _seem_ … malicious.”  
  
There was a surge of warmth in his chest, and Eddie couldn’t deny that it felt nice. _‘So you will let me stay?’_  
  
Eddie laughed. “I’m gonna be honest here; that’s mostly because I don’t think I have a choice.” He looked pointedly down at where his arms and legs were still held tight to the wall with the black ropes. As he hoped, they then receded and slowly lowered him to his feet. He took a few steps forward (around fallen books and the broken lamp) and sat down on an ottoman, glad to see that his limbs didn’t feel heavy anymore.  
  
_‘But you will stop fighting?’_  
  
Shrugging into a nod, Eddie said, “Yeah. _For now._ No promises I won’t go throw myself into the nearest incinerator if you pull some weird shit on me again though.”  
  
The voice seemed to think for a moment, before it said in its deep, resounding echo, _‘It is a deal.’_  
  
He couldn’t help thinking it was a little bit more like a hostage situation, but he shrugged it off. Fighting hadn’t gotten him anything but a mess to clean up (he looked around the apartment; Anne was going to be pissed), so he figured he’d just… chill, for a while. Breathe and figure this all out at whatever pace he could. After all, if the thing was to be believed then he had all the time in the world.  
  
_‘As long as we eat,’_ it chimed in.  
  
“Ah, so that’s what that sudden hunger was about,” Eddie said, humming. He wasn’t sure he was gonna be able to afford to keep up a diet like that-- even _if_ Anne and Dan didn’t kick him out.  
  
_‘We consume more to heal,’_ the voice explained. _‘Don’t get hurt. We won’t have to eat so much.’_  
  
The next few minutes were spent picking books up off the floor and trying to replace them on their shelves, smoothing out pages that had gotten crushed when they fell, and talking to the… the _parasite_ as he straightened them out.  
  
_‘Not a parasite!’_ it yelled at him, sounding very offended. _‘We are Klyntar.’_  
  
“Well I don’t know what that means,” Eddie said, and was answered with a slap-dash slide-show history lesson about the alien species’ origins. It was all a little too sci-fi for him but he hummed at it, gathering what he could from the convoluted story. “Right. So you’re aliens that take over other peoples’ bodies and eat their organs. Sounds like a parasite to me.”  
  
Disappointment radiated from the essence. _‘Not supposed to be that way,’_ it told him, squirming a little. _‘We need to find a host to share a body with. Work together.’_  
  
That was what it _said,_ but it didn’t make sense to Eddie. He frowned and asked, “Then what’s with all the zombies, huh? Why are they out of their mind and dead within a month? That doesn’t look much like sharing to me.”  
  
The voice was sad. Regretful, Eddie might say. _‘Difficult to find the right host. Rare. Wrong match is uncomfortable. Ends badly, in pain and death. Sad. We do not wish to hurt humans; only to survive.’_  
  
The frustration Eddie had been feeling faded out of him as he came to understand, that the parasites weren’t taking people over just to be a pain in humanity’s collective ass, that maybe they were victims in this situation too-- though, in kind of a different way.  
  
“Hey…” he started, meaning to ask why the parasites had come to Earth to begin with. His train of thought was interrupted though, as his new alien friend swiveled around inside of him and brought his attention to the front door, just before a knock came at it. Eddie looked around at the mess; he really hadn’t meant to let anyone see the destruction, but if he was lucky it would just be another delivery boy, and they’d only get a glimpse of it at best... 


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re gonna let me get this, right?”   
  
The alien didn’t respond with words, but it seemed to nod, so Eddie picked through the remaining debris on the floor and made his way to the front door, which he opened to find, unfortunately, a uniformed police officer, looking, as they tended to, both bored and brimming with authoritative energy.   
  
“Um, can I help you, officer?” Eddie asked, grinning uneasily, scrubbing a hand back through his hair.   
  
“We had a call that said there seemed to be some sort of problem happening over here? Yelling, and some other loud noises? Is everything alright?”   
  
_‘You should have stayed calm,’_ the parasite said.   
  
Biting his lip against responding, Eddie told the policeman, “Every… everything’s fine, officer.”   
  
The cop nodded, though he didn’t seem entirely convinced. (Eddie had really failed to be convincing lately.) “Is there anyone else in the apartment this evening?” he asked, looking through the sliver of space between Eddie and the door.   
  
“It’s just me,” Eddie said. He gave the man what he hoped was a smile that inspired confidence.   
  
The officer broke eye contact with Eddie for a moment and then asked, “Can I come in for a moment? Just to check that everything’s alright before I leave you alone.”   
  
The absolute worst thing was that Eddie knew he couldn’t say no. It had always been like this to a degree in the city, but especially these days anyone living in the city knew that not cooperating with the police could get you in trouble, if only because it gave them reason to be more suspicious of you. Taking a deep breath, he stepped back and held the door open for the cop, letting it close gently behind them. As he followed the man in, he knew that he was staring at the mess of the living room. The shattered lamp and the various tables and chairs that had been knocked over.   
  
“I, um… I just got a little, uh, enthusiastic when I was practicing for a gig earlier,” Eddie lied, coming around to lay a hand on his guitar, which was still sitting on the couch from earlier. “There was kind of a… domino effect.”   
  
The policeman definitely seemed a little worried, but he didn’t say anything, just continuing to look around the house, opening all the doors and taking quick peeks inside, as if to make sure there weren’t any kidnapped kids or abused spouses hiding somewhere. (Eddie liked to think he didn’t _look_ like the kind of guy who would kidnap a kid or abuse a spouse, but especially with his nervous manner and general unshaven slovenness, he didn’t spend a lot of time kidding himself about it.)   
  
It seemed like the officer was almost done with his impromptu search (meaning they could get back to more important matters, like determining a hostile alien species’ motives, and cleaning up so Anne didn’t murder him), when the man paused and stared at the kitchen window, in which was sitting none other than Mr. Belvedere.   
  
“Is that your cat?” the cop asked, and Eddie could only sigh, knowing the night had just gone from bad to worst. “I’m sorry, but you know I’m going to have to take it in. No pets in the city limits.”   
  
Eddie covered his face and groaned as the officer approached Mr.B. “Officer, please, don’t.”   
  
“I’m sure you know the threat animals pose these days,” the man said, likely just repeating what he’d heard and been told a million times, because it wasn’t like there was really any higher chance of an animal tracking in a parasite than there was of a human doing the same.   
  
“He doesn’t even go outside!” Eddie tried to reason, but the officer just shook his head and reached carefully for Mr. B, who looked understandably nervous to be approached by someone he didn’t know.   
  
“I’m sorry,” the policeman said. “The law is the law.”   
  
Shit shit shit, was the litany running through Eddie’s head as the officer grabbed the cat and held him under his arm and by his collar, and took him to the door, towards who-knew-what kind of fate. Eddie had never thought about what happened to all the confiscated pets, but he could guess it wasn’t good.   
  
_‘Save the small creature?’_ the alien asked, and Eddie just mumbled in response, “I dunno, _I dunno.”_   
  
Before he knew what he was doing, he’d followed the man to the door, hovering at his elbow. “Officer, wait, isn’t there anything I could do?”   
  
The officer turned, a look of severe annoyance on his face as he struggled to hold on to the struggling Mr. Belvedere, who growled angrily, twisting in the man’s hands. “I can’t let you keep this cat,” he told Eddie, scowling. “Animals like this are prime targets for parasites! Do you want to be the one responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe _thousands,_ when your cat brings one of those things into the city?”  
  
As the man spoke, Eddie became aware of kind of a tingling sensation in his foot, and had to stop himself from looking down at what he knew was a thin black tendril sprouting from him near the ground and reaching up behind the officer until it could undo the latch on the cat’s collar. It took the parasite a few moments to fiddle with the clasp, during which time Eddie kept his gaze focused solely on the cop.   
  
“No, officer, of course not,” he said, trying to keep the officer’s attention on him. “Y’know, I dealt with one of those things once, and I know it’s not fun. It took a big bite out of my heart, my liver, a couple other organs. Of course I don’t want them in the city. It’s just… Mr. B here, he’s my emotional support cat. He means a lot to me!”   
  
The officer’s expression fell into something more empathetic, but he still shook his head, denying Eddie’s request. (Not that Eddie hadn’t expected him to do exactly that.) “I feel for you, man, but I’ve got to do my job, alright? I can’t prioritize one person’s mental health over the safety of everyone in the city. I’ll make sure your cat’s handled respectfully but--”   
  
Finally, the collar’s clasp came undone, and Mr. Belvedere struggled free, falling to the floor and leaving the officer stunned, holding on to just his collar. Luckily, he had the sense to bolt as soon as his feet touched concrete, running down the walkway and out into the street.   
  
“Hey, get back here!” the officer yelled, and took off after Mr. B.   
  
Eddie sighed as he watched them go. He knew the cop had next to no chance of catching the cat, and that was the only relief he had. At very least, Mr. B had some chance of surviving on the street, instead of being euthanized or whatever it was that happened when they were taken in. Groaning, Eddie turned around and went back inside, trudging into the living room and sitting down heavily on the arm of the couch furthest from the shattered lamp.   
  
Head in his hands, Eddie muttered, “God, could this night get any worse?”   
  
_‘Yes,’_ the voice said matter-of-factly. It waited a moment as Eddie took a deep breath, then continued, _‘I am sorry about your cat.’_  
  
“He’s not _my_ cat, he’s _Anne’s_ cat,” Eddie said. “And she’s going to absolutely kill me.”   
  
He thought the alien probably knew he was being over-dramatic (though only by a little; Anne was really going to be apoplectic with rage), but it growled in a protective way that rumbled through Eddie’s chest and said, _‘We will kill her first.’_  
  
Scoffing, Eddie replied, “Yeah, I think _not,_ buddy.”   
  
There was a squirmy feeling at his shoulder and a moment later he nearly had a heart attack when one of the alien’s black tentacles reached around in front of him and morphed into a terrifying face-- black and snakelike but humanoid all the same, with overly large white eyes and more razor-sharp teeth than any one creature could possibly need.   
  
_“We will protect us from all threats,”_ it said, its deep, gritty, oily voice echoing only as far as the space would allow, instead of endlessly in his own mind.   
  
“Oh god, okay, you have a face,” Eddie said in response, flinching back on instinct, even though he could feel that the parasite only wanted to talk to him the ways humans did, and had no ill intent.   
  
_“NOT a parasite,”_ it reminded him. _“We are symbiotic with our hosts.”_  
  
“The _good_ ones anyway, right?” Eddie said, a bit teasing in his nervousness, and the creature simply responded, _“Yes.”_ Gazing off into the middle distance, maybe zoning out a little after the stress of the last hour, Eddie said in an introspective way, “I wonder what makes me one of the good ones.”   
  
Warmly, as if it was proud, the alien said, _“You are our match. We were meant to be as one.”_ _  
__  
_ “‘Meant to be’, huh?” Eddie smiled wryly. He didn’t know if he believed in stuff like fate, soulmates, that kind of junk, but it seemed true that this particular par--... this _alien,_ it wasn’t like the others he’d ever seen, and it didn’t rip him up from the inside like the first one. It just made him spend his meager earnings on choice cuts of steak, and, well, the mess they’d made this evening. But he was pretty sure they were past that now.   
  
Now? Now he wasn’t sure _what_ they were gonna do.   
  
_“Live,”_ it said to him, answering his unspoken question.   
  
“That’s it?” Eddie asked. It sounded nice enough, but after everything he’d come to believe about the parasites, he could hardly believe that one would have such simple aspirations. “Is that gonna be enough for you? You don’t have plans to take over the world or something?”   
  
A very heavy silence fell between them for a moment, and then the alien replied quite casually, _“Not really.”_  
  
Eddie had next to no idea if it was joking, so he just laughed. It was time to start rolling with the punches anyway. But, back to the _real_ matter at hand, he looked around at the remaining mess. “Well if living is something you’re interested in, we’re gonna have to clean this place up.”   
  
The creature’s floating head turned away from Eddie and looked pointedly at the shattered glass and miscellaneous debris before it turned back. _“You should not fear Anne. She is weak. We could take her.”_  
  
He couldn’t hold back the snort that pushed its way out of him then. Obviously the thing didn’t understand the intricacies of their… hierarchy. “I think you’re underestimating her,” Eddie said, then explained further, “Besides, it’s not that I’m literally scared of her. I just don’t want to upset her. You know. Because we’re friends.”   
  
Eddie got the feeling the alien was blinking, even though its eyes didn’t move. _“I do not want to upset_ you,” it said eventually, like it had come to some sort of understanding. _“We will clean up the mess.”_  
  
So it was that _that_ was how Anne and Dan found them, when they returned several minutes later. Eddie was sat on the floor by a pile of books that had fallen off the shelf, smoothing out the pages of each one before handing it up to one of the alien’s tendrils so it could stick it back on the shelf.   
  
“Eddie, do you know why there are police out fro--”   
  
Anne’s reasonable question was interrupted by her own shriek of fear as she came in and moved to hang her keys up by the door. They clattered to the ground instead, though the jarring noise was mostly drowned out by her scream.   
  
“Eddie, watch out!” she yelled, frantically digging through her purse for something as Dan came up behind her, caught sight of Eddie, and gasped, saying simply, “What the--?!”   
  
Hurriedly, Eddie put his hands up, seeing that Anne had just found the lipstick-shaped mini disruptor grenade she’d started carrying on her since Eddie’s first encounter with a parasite. (The alien stuck its little tendrils up too, dividing the ends into vague hand-shapes. Its apprehension flooded through Eddie along with his own; the sound grenade probably wouldn’t strictly _hurt_ either of them, but it certainly wouldn’t be pleasant, and he didn’t want to give either of his roommates the chance to decide it was okay to risk their apartment in favor of torching his alien.)   
  
“Wait, wait, Annie, stop! This one’s a friend, I promise! Please don’t throw that thing at us! I’ve had enough headaches today.”   
  
_“Friend?!”_ Anne asked shrilly, staring at him (them) in wide-eyed horror.   
  
Dan looked more worried than scared (though that was normal for him; he was the worrier of the family.) “What the hell did you get into, Ed?”   
  
“It’s… kind of a long story,” Eddie said in a rush, grimacing, “but, god, please put the grenade down and we can talk about this like civilized… uh, people.”   
  
Eyes almost impossibly huge, Anne shook her head. “I think I’ll hold on to it. Now you tell me exactly what’s going on!”   
  
She didn’t move from her spot near the front door, but Dan came forward and stood slightly in front of her, and luckily the look on his face was one of… almost professional curiosity. “Eddie. That’s a parasite, right?”   
  
“Uh. Yes and no,” he replied, as the alien echoed quietly in his head (as it had gone back inside, except for its tentacle-arms), _‘Not a parasite,’_ in an indignant way that lacked a lot of its usual fervor-- probably because it was still a bit nervous. “It’s not a parasite. It’s made that abundantly clear. Hates the term, actually. But, yeah, it’s… one of those things.”   
  
“Then you need to get it out of you immediately!” Anne said, eyebrows drawn down in concern. She knew almost as well as Eddie how badly he’d been messed up the first time, and honestly he appreciated how worried she was over his well-being.   
  
But Eddie just shook his head. “No, no, y’see, it’s-- he’s-- this one’s not like that. He’s healing me, actually. We… we came to an agreement.”   
  
“What does that _mean,_ Eddie?”   
  
_‘Tell them we are partners,’_ the voice echoed.   
  
Even just admitting the situation was difficult. Maybe embarrassing wasn’t the word, but he found it hard to tell his friends that he had a _connection_ to this alien life-form. “I… told him he could stay,” Eddie offered with a shrug.   
  
Anne just gaped at him, still lightly fingering the mini-grenade (though probably just unconsciously). A step closer, Dan was staring at them like he was trying to figure out a puzzle. “So you’re feeling okay?” he asked, with one eyebrow raised. He had heard in plenty of detail how much pain the first parasite encounter had caused, so Eddie knew he was trying to reconcile the two concepts.   
  
“Yeah,” Eddie said, slowly putting his hands down. (The alien put his hands down as well, resting them on Eddie’s shoulders.) “I feel great, actually. I mean… relatively,” he specified, glancing around meaningfully. He half expected one of them to ask what had happened to the place, but apparently they were able to put two and two together.   
  
Dan let out quite a sigh, which released tension from Anne as well; she slowly set the grenade down on the table and folded her arms, looking between Dan and Eddie, waiting for an explanation.   
  
“You’re saying it healed you?” Dan asked, and Eddie could almost see him standing there in his lab coat, clipboard in hand, taking notes on his peculiar medical situation. He guessed that wasn’t an inaccurate description of it anyway.   
  
“I, I think so,” Eddie said. “At least, it doesn’t feel anything like the first time. Y’know? It doesn’t hurt. And it doesn’t scream in my head. He just kinda talks normally. I know, it sounds crazy.” He held up his hands in a placating sort of way, and the alien copied him, raising his makeshift palms off Eddie’s shoulders and shadowing Eddie’s movements.   
  
Cocking his head slightly, Dan asked, “And… do you control those arms?” He gestured.   
  
Eddie looked over his shoulder and was a little surprised to see them there, but not freaked out like he’d been before. It was more like forgetting that you’d gotten a haircut and being surprised when you saw the change. “Uh, not really,” he said, moving his arms around a little to demonstrate that he had no control-- except that they followed his movements. Humming, he reached up towards the bookshelf, and one of the arms stretched up further and plucked out a book for him, delivering it into his outstretched hand. He laughed. “Well, I mean… maybe? Kind of? I think he reads my thoughts, but I can’t really _control_ him. It’s more like… like neither one of us is really _using_ the other. Like it’s…”   
  
“Symbiotic,” Dan finished. “So this one’s a new… strain? A symbiote?” He nodded, the puzzle pieces apparently slotting together in some way Eddie couldn’t quite see.   
  
“No, he says they’re _all_ like that; symbiotes,” Eddie tried to explain. “Just that they have to find the right host first. A bad one is like, I dunno… wearing a pair of shoes that’re too small? You can do it but not for long, or you’ll start damaging yourself.”   
  
“And the world’s just full of too-small shoes?” Anne asked, looking a little bit skeptical. (As was her wont. She was a lawyer, after all.) “Billions of people in the world, and thousands of these things, and none of them have ever found the right match before?”   
  
Eddie shrugged, uncomfortable under Anne’s hawklike gaze. “That’s what it sounds like.”   
  
The symbiote’s hands rested on Eddie’s shoulders again, massaging slightly. _‘She does not understand,’_ he said, rumbling softly through Eddie’s core. _‘It is a rare gift.’_  
  
Shaking her head at him, she said, “That’s bull. It’s _using you,_ Eddie! I mean it’s impressive that it can talk to you, apparently, but isn’t it a little far-fetched to think that you’re the one lucky person who managed to get infected by just the right parasite?” (Eddie felt like he should remind her that this was his second run, and explain to her somehow that he could _feel_ the difference, deep inside him, but he didn’t get a chance before she made her next proposal.) “We need to get you to the hospital.”   
  
Hot fear flooded through Eddie and the symbiote, Eddie’s brain providing ample (half-imagined) imagery of what happened when an infected person was found. At the hospital, it was basically the same as what the hunters did, but more sterile and with nowhere to run. Eddie had already been burned alive once; he didn’t need to experience it a second time, especially not as an echo of the death of a creature he _didn’t dislike._  
  
But luckily it was not just Eddie (and the symbiote) who disliked this idea; Dan put a hand on Anne’s shoulder and shook his head at her. “Anne, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said, giving her a soft look, almost a little sad.   
  
She looked at him like she’d been betrayed. “These things are dangerous! Even if it’s not hurting Eddie, it could drop him and latch on to someone new any time!”   
  
_‘I would not do that.’_  
  
“He wouldn’t do that,” Eddie told them, glancing between the two of them, hoping at least one would believe him, take the time to hear him out. “We have a good match. There’s no reason for him to switch it up like that.”   
  
Anne scoffed, and she didn’t even have to say anything for Eddie to know what she was thinking, and to feel a little embarrassed about it. It _was_ strange, kind of humorously embarrassing, that he’d been viciously trying to get rid of the alien just an hour ago, and now he was defending it, defending their _bond,_ whatever it was. (The symbiote swirled around warm and comfortable in his chest, listening to Eddie accept him like that.)   
  
“I really thought you of all people would be against this, Eddie,” Anne said, frowning.   
  
He almost told her that he _had_ been, but he didn’t want to cast any more doubts on his new relationship. “I thought so too,” he said instead. “But this is different. Anne, you have to believe me.”   
  
Unsurprisingly, Anne shook her head. The surprise came when Dan said, “I believe you,” and then turned to Anne. “I think he’s right. And… I don’t think this _is_ the first time this has happened.”   
  
“What do you mean?” Anne asked, as Eddie wondered the same thing and the creature stirred in curiosity-- though he seemed to feel a little validated already, as if he understood.   
  
The distinctly uncomfortable look Dan had had a few minutes before returned with a vengeance. “I’ve helped deal with infected people before,” he started, looking between his two visible audience members with the practiced confidence that came of being a doctor. “Sometimes there’s nothing we can do, but sometimes the parasite can be separated from the person. You know that.”   
  
Anne nodded; Eddie blinked; Dan continued explaining.   
  
“It’s usually one of the same few stories. Predictable. The infected host is sick and hungry and they don’t know they’re infected, and we shock the parasite out of them and kill it. Sometimes they know they’ve been bit and they’ll come to us for help before it can do much damage. The hospital almost never deals with late-term hosts. If they’re beyond helping, they’re transferred elsewhere.”   
  
(Eddie’s stomach roiled, the symbiote hating the visualizations Eddie’s mind conjured, even at such simple procedures, things that had become commonplace in the humans’ lives.)   
  
Dan continued, finally getting to the relevant, meaty part of the tale. “But sometimes someone will be brought in. They never bring themselves in. They’re always dragged in by a family member, or a police officer. They don’t _seem_ infected, until they start fighting us. They yell and beg. ‘Don’t do this.’ And the black oozes out of them in strings, latches on to things...” He nodded in Eddie’s direction, at the symbiote’s oily hands resting on Eddie’s shoulders still, gently seething in that way they did, never entirely still. “You don’t see that in most infected people. And most infected people _want_ to be helped. I never understood why some of them didn’t. We always thought they must have been sicker than the others.”   
  
The look on Anne’s face was mildly horrified. It wasn’t an unusual expression to have when talking about parasites, but it was obvious in this case that it wasn’t the same old usual disgust. “Maybe they were,” she said, though she sounded faint.   
  
Shaking his head, Dan said, “It makes more sense now. I’ve only been involved in a few of those cases, but they always left me shook. It took so much disruption to shake the parasite out of them that it started giving _us_ headaches, even on the other side of the glass. And the way the person always reached for it… I felt like we were doing something terrible but it didn’t make any sense. We were doctors; we would never do anything to hurt a person intentionally. When it was over, the victim always seemed so much worse than when they came in, but we thought it was… like withdrawal. We thought we were helping.”   
  
The creature’s hands were gripping Eddie’s shoulders now, tense, both of them. _‘That will not be us,’_ he said, and Eddie couldn’t help thinking it sounded like he was trying to convince himself just as much as reassure his host.   
  
“I won’t let it,” Eddie muttered quietly. It was horrible. The mere _thought_ of it was painful to him, to them, to think that they could be tortured and ripped apart so violently like that, Eddie then sent on his merry way as if they expected him to just _be okay._ And all in the name of helping people.   
  
His roommates turned curiously to him. “You won’t let it?” Anne repeated.   
  
“Be us,” Eddie finished, waving it off without an explanation. He turned to Dan, trying not to be angry with the man but not entirely succeeding. “Didn’t you guys ever think to… I dunno, _listen_ to them? I mean, do you amputate someone’s leg just because you think it looks uncomfortable?”   
  
Clearly ashamed, Dan bowed his head as if in some sort of apology. “We were just following the protocol. You know, Eddie. How scared everyone is, just at the _thought_ of parasites. And there _is_ study being done, but it’s all still secretive.”   
  
Eddie nodded and took a deep breath, clearing the disturbing imagery from his mind.   
  
Anne wasn’t quite ready to calm down yet though; there were still too many questions to be asked. “How on earth did this even happen, Eddie?” she asked, her posture giving away how tired the situation had left her. She took a few steps closer so she could lean against the back of the couch. Dan took the opportunity to set his things down on the kitchen counter, but he turned to watch as Eddie answered.   
  
“Uh… I don’t really--...”   
  
_‘I came from the outside,’_ the symbiote said. _‘When you retrieved the cat. I transfered to you when the frequency shook me, at the edge of the city.’_  
  
“God was _that_ why he was freaking out?” Eddie tsk’d. “Figures. That hurt like a bitch, you know.”   
  
_‘Sorry.’_  
  
“Eddie?” Anne asked, raising an eyebrow.   
  
Snapping back to attention (this was going to be a real problem; he could just see it), Eddie said, “Yeah, sorry. Um. You know how Mr. B got out the other day?”   
  
Anne’s expression fell flat and she stared at him so hard he could almost feel the burn. “Eddie. You let my cat get infected by an alien parasite?!”   
  
_‘I did not hurt him’_ the symbiote said. _‘I wasn’t hungry.’_  
  
“He was okay,” Eddie told her, grimacing. Then the color drained from his face as he remembered. “Oh. God. ...Anne, I’m sorry.”   
  
Anne gave a magnanimous shrug. “No harm no foul, I guess. He seemed fine enough when I saw him earlier. I will hold you responsible though, if he comes down with premature heart failure or something!”   
  
Eddie was pretty sure she was at least half joking in that regard, since Mr. Belvedere was easily in his senior years already, but her light-hearted ribbing didn’t set him at ease when he still had to tell her what had happened. “Actually… Please don’t kill me but he’s missing again.”   
  
He could feel the temperature in the room practically drop. “He’s missing?” she asked, her voice quiet. “What happened?”   
  
“The, uh…” Eddie swallowed hard. God how he wished he didn’t have to tell her this. “We were, you know, making a little bit of noise earlier and I guess someone called the cops. The officer… tried to take him.”   
  
“Tried?” Anne asked faintly.   
  
“He got out of his collar and ran,” Eddie explained with a severely apologetic shrug. “I doubt the cop managed to catch him, but, yeah, he’s out.”   
  
The air in the room was unspeakably tense as Anne looked away, staring off into the middle distance. She apparently had no words for how she was feeling, but Eddie could guess. She’d had that cat longer than she’d had either him or Dan. Longer than she’d had her career. Mr. Belvedere was her one remaining piece of the times _before,_ and Eddie understood how much that meant to her. He wished he had something like that.   
  
The symbiote spoke then, his head having materialized up out of Eddie’s shoulder while nobody was looking, spooking everyone with his rumbling voice. _“We can find him,”_ he said to Anne.   
  
“He has a _face?”_ Dan said, staring in wary fascination.   
  
“Oh, yeah,” Eddie replied with a short laugh. “Scared the shit out of me at first.”   
  
Anne was either unphased, or got over the shock almost immediately so she could deal with the more important matter. “You can?” she asked the symbiote, giving him her full attention instead of directing the question through Eddie or even glancing at him for confirmation.   
  
_“We remember him,”_ the symbiote said. _“His smell, his distinct vibrations.”_  
  
“The purring,” Eddie explained. “It was a nice, uh, frequency, I guess.”   
  
It seemed that Anne had to take a moment to think about it. Although it was clear that she would go to great lengths to get back her pet, she was still apprehensive about letting Eddie keep the symbiote, let alone accepting help from it, because if she did that then she would be in debt to it. Eventually she nodded and said, “Find him. ...Please.”   
  
And so the conversation about whether or not the symbiote was _okay_ (and whether or not Eddie was maybe just not-right in the head) was put on hold. They all knew that the decision to either keep their secret or try to force a move hinged largely on whether or not they could find Mr. B.   
  
_‘We can find him,’_ the symbiote echoed, safely stored inside Eddie again as they went out into the night. (Luckily the police had left by that time.) Downstairs, Eddie was about to hop on his motorcycle, figuring speed would be their ally, but the alien stopped him. _‘We go on foot. Faster that way through small spaces.’_  
  
Eddie remembered chasing the cat the first time, and how hard it was to corner him, when the cat had a much wider range of avenues it could take. The bike might be faster on straightaways, but when it came to alleys it wouldn’t be much use.   
  
“Right,” Eddie said. “Just tell me which way to go.” 


	6. Chapter 6

They started down an alleyway a half a block from the apartment complex, Eddie going at a fast walk as the symbiote tried to sense Mr. Belvedere. At the creature’s suggestion he took a turn, and then another, winding his way down side-roads and alleys and peoples’ back yards as they caught whiffs of the scent of the cat, or whatever other visceral sixth-sense it was that the alien was running on.   
  
_‘He is still distant,’_ he said, as they lingered in the alley behind a liquor store, trying to decide the best route to take through the next block. Eddie wasn’t expecting the symbiote’s next suggestion. _‘Take the ladder. The rooftops will be better.’_  
  
Eddie laughed incredulously. “Um, no. I dunno about that. I’m not… I’m not really good with heights.”   
  
_‘We will not fall.’_  
  
Well it wasn’t that Eddie really doubted that. It seemed like those tentacles could probably stick to just about anything, and probably stop them from tumbling headfirst off a ledge and cracking their skull on the sidewalk, which was reassuring, really. But what if the alien popped out of him at just the wrong time and left him falling? Trusting the thing not to eat his organs was one thing, but _this_ was a friendship exercise he wasn’t sure he was ready for.   
  
There was a sense of the symbiote staring at him-- internally, of course; he probably wouldn’t risk them by materializing in broad evening-light. _‘We will not fall,’_ he repeated. Eddie held his breath for a moment, stewed on it, and then shook his head (at himself) and said, “Fine. You haven’t killed me so far.”   
  
So it was up the ladder they went, to the roof of the liquor store. It was still early enough in the evening to be rather busy out, so they hid in the shadow of the store’s air conditioning unit, hoping nobody would look up and see Eddie lurking there like some sort of criminal or comic book superhero while his alien body-mate put out more feelers to locate an illegal cat.   
  
“...Y’know, I was normal a few days ago,” Eddie said, mostly to himself.   
  
_‘No you were not,’_ the symbiote replied evenly. Eddie scoffed, ready to sarcastically thank his new friend for the teasing insult, before the symbiote continued, _‘You were always different. Unique.’_  
  
“Huh. Right.” He laughed dismissively. “A real special snowflake, just like everyone else on this planet.”   
  
_‘Better,’_ the symbiote said, and he said no more on the subject, but the straightforwardness of the compliment was so _mushy_ it made Eddie blush and turn his attention literally anywhere else. This alien had been terrorizing him just a few hours ago; how dare it be so _nice_ now, trying to butter Eddie up so he wouldn’t kick it to the curb. (The symbiote expressed doubt at that, but said nothing.)   
  
They loitered around on the roof of the liquor store for another few minutes while--...   
  
...Eddie realized fairly suddenly that he didn’t know if the creature had a name. Alien, symbiote, parasite, ‘Klyntar’. But what was he supposed to call him? _He_ very kindly didn’t go around calling him ‘human’ all the time, so it seemed kind of rude to refer to the alien exclusively by its species (or their colloquial terms for it).   
  
_‘You call me Venom,’_ the symbiote echoed in answer, and Eddie first thought that was a strange name, and second realized _how_ ‘Venom’ had phrased that, as if it was something Eddie had already decided and just needed to be reminded of.   
  
“When the heck did I call you that?” he asked, searching his brain. He was pretty sure he’d never given it such an over-the-top name-- or any name at all.   
  
Images, sensations, and an echo of his own thoughts from years before filtered through his mind; the symbiote was a lot better at searching his brain than _he_ was, and presented him with the answers cleanly. It was when he’d had that first fateful, terrible encounter. Venom, searing poison. Yeah, he had thought that when he’d been taken over by the parasite. And again, when he finally realized (or accepted) what this new voice in his head was. Frantic associations had run through his mind, ‘this one is like that one’, less than half-conscious thoughts, ‘it’s venom, it’s poisoning me’, fears and worries and words he hadn’t decided on with any sort of purpose.   
  
Pulling out of the pit of his own thoughts, he shook his head. “Out of all the things I thought about you, that’s the one you went with?”   
  
The silence was palpable for a moment, and Eddie sort of thought ‘Venom’ wasn’t going to answer him at all, but before he could try the alien’s trick of delving into their shared brain in hopes of finding the answer without being told, the symbiote replied simply, _‘I like it,’_ and Eddie had to laugh, because of course he’d got the parasite with a sense for dramatic flair.   
  
“Cute,” he said, smirking. “Well it fits better than… ‘John’ or something anyway. I mean, can you imagine that? ‘Hi, I’m Eddie Brock and this is my alien symbiote, John.’” He laughed at the absurdity of it, including the idea that he would be going around introducing the two of them to anyone, let alone anyone who didn’t already know him.   
  
Still, it was good to have something to call the creature by other than ‘symbiote’, which just felt too pretentious to be coming out of his mouth. Better to leave that kind of speech to the doctors and lawyers.   
  
He took a deep breath and said, “Well, okay. It’s nice to meet you, Venom,” because he’d always felt that proper introductions were important.   
  
Venom was a little curious about the concept of introducing oneself to someone that you already knew (and shared a body with), but he responded in kind. _‘It is nice to meet you, Eddie.’_  
  
\--And with that finally behind them, Venom returned to scanning for signs of Mr. Belvedere. _‘He is south-east,’_ he said after a minute or so. _‘A mile from here.’_  
  
“Okay.” Eddie looked down at the streets from their frightening but useful vantage point above it all. “So, should we go down Whittaker to Elm, or go around and take Hillcrest?”   
  
He knew that Venom could see inside his brain, so it wasn’t like using street names was likely to confuse him. But he didn’t expect the symbiote to shoot down both his suggestions without even offering a third street-route. _‘Keep the high ground,’_ he said, a suggestion at which Eddie balked, because he couldn’t possibly be suggesting what Eddie _thought_ he was suggesting. _‘Yes I am. Take the rooftops.’_  
  
Laughing nervously, Eddie backed up against the AC unit, his back flush against it. “Haha, no. No. Really. One rooftop was more than enough for me. That’s my daily limit.”   
  
‘We _have no limit,’_ Venom told him, and he could feel its toothy grin metaphorically looming over him as it pushed him to the edge of the building, not with black tendrils but by moving Eddie’s stiff hesitant legs. _‘Let go. We will not fall.’_  
  
“Easy for you not to be scared,” Eddie said, scrunching his eyes shut. “You’re made of goo. Human bones don’t splat so well.”   
  
_‘There will be no splatting,’_ Venom assured him. _‘And no crunching,’_ he added, although there was a streak of hunger threaded throughout it, a desire for a crunching that he controlled.   
  
Between the thought of jumping from rooftop to rooftop and the idea of crushing skulls and eating brains, neither was particularly appealing to Eddie, so he focused on the one that was more relevant and slightly less stomach-churning. “Fine,” he said, letting out a long sigh and trying to relax his tense muscles. “I’m trusting you.”   
  
In his mind, Venom gave a cat-like grin, and then they were off. Off, literally off the ground. Eddie’s body was springing across the ten-foot gap between one building and the next, and if his breath wasn’t caught in his throat he probably would have screamed. (So it was better that it was. They didn’t need an audience.) As it was, his brain was just a short-circuit loop of ‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit’ for the impossibly long second it took to land safely on the other side. Once they were there, his feet planted firmly on the concrete roof of… some building or another, Eddie collapsed, his knees hitting the floor bruisingly rough. (The pain faded almost immediately. Bruises were a thing of the past.)   
  
“Oh god, that was… terrifying,” he gasped, curled up into a safe little ball over his knees.   
  
_‘There is much more to come,’_ Venom said with a smirk. _‘If you want to find Anne’s pet.’_  
  
At this very point in time, Eddie wasn’t caring all that much whether Mr. B found a home elsewhere or lived off cockroaches in back alleys for the rest of his mangey life, but he knew Venom was right. (And Venom was right because he could read Eddie’s mind.) Finding Mr. Belvedere was what they’d come out for, and it was probably the only way they were going to make any sort of peace with Anne (and Dan, by association). And Eddie needed that. For all that he suddenly didn’t feel nearly as alone as he used to, he still needed to stay in his best friends’ good graces as much as possible, even if he ended up moving away because of all of this.   
  
Sighing, Eddie dragged himself up to his feet, knowing that Venom would likely do so if he didn’t. “Okay,” he said, with a deep centering breath. “Okay. I can do this. Let’s go get that cat.” He clenched his jaw and stepped towards the next edge, ignoring how he shook and taking another step, until he was running, and before he knew it he was in the air a second time, straining forward toward the next rooftop, and touching down on the crackly gravel strewn across it. He didn’t give himself time to be scared, hurrying to the next edge, the directions clear in his mind through Venom’s unspoken instruction, and over the next few minutes he ran, faster than he could ever remember running before, and jumped further than he was pretty sure would have ever been possible on his own, across several blocks of intermittent urban decay. As frightening as it was, he realized after the seventh or eighth jump that he wasn’t as scared as he expected to be, and when he thought about _why,_ Venom wordlessly showed that he was keeping Eddie’s vitals steady, absorbing the excess adrenaline and cortisol gleefully.   
  
He still thought he was going to die when they misjudged the distance of one building that ended up slightly too tall and far away. As the ground rushed at them, Eddie clawed for the rough stone of the wall before them, and was surprised when he caught it.   
  
_‘I told you we would not fall,’_ Venom said, spurring them to begin the climb back up the brick siding to the roof.   
  
“I guess we have different definitions of ‘fall’,” Eddie grumbled. “Because that seemed like falling to me.” Even so, he had neither splatted nor crunched on the asphalt below, and he hadn’t even scraped his palms to death on the rough brick. He took a moment to glance down at his hands as he climbed; his palms were coated, a thin but supple layer of the symbiote’s gooey body covering the soft inners of his hands like half of a very specialized glove.   
  
“Huh,” he said, testing it on the texture of the brick, pleased with how it gripped perfectly but came loose as soon as he pulled it. Inspired, he scurried all the way up the building, and once he was at the top he cast around for another, which he quickly launched himself at.   
  
_‘Not so scary now?’_  
  
On one hand, yes, of course it was. But on the other hand-- well, what made things scary was your lack of control over them, wasn’t it? And maybe it was only a level of false control, because Venom could still vanish at any moment, no matter what he said he wouldn’t do, and that would leave Eddie completely at the whims of physics and his human limitations again, but for the time being he definitely _felt_ in control. Enough, at least, to have fun with it. Cautiously.   
  
“Just don’t drop us,” Eddie said, and Venom grinned, happy to have Eddie properly on board now. (Or at least mostly.)   
  
_‘We won’t,’_ he promised. It seemed obvious that he was enjoying it at least as much as his host was. Idly, Eddie wondered what other hosts he’d had before. Other humans? Animals? Had he been able to run like this before? Because it didn’t feel like he’d ever had that freedom.   
  
_‘We were a bird once,’_ the symbiote mentioned, sharing memories of the flights he’d taken in those few short days. But neither that host nor any of the others had ever meshed well enough with Venom for him to reach out like this, make proper use of his amorphous form and abilities. He’d never stabilized in any of them. Eddie supposed that made sense; if any parasite in any zombie was able to use the stringy black tendrils, humanity would have been fighting an entirely different war.   
  
This was a first for both of them.   
  
Excited to finally be able to explore their full abilities, Eddie rushed on to the next rooftop and the one after that, leaping further each time, clinging and climbing higher and higher, always in the subconscious direction of their goal, while Venom surged here and there, in and out of the confines of Eddie’s body, coating the places where they made contact with the brick and concrete, and covering his face in a mask to break the wind of their increasing speed. He supplemented Eddie’s movement, pushing against the ground when they jumped, reaching out with sticky black ropes to pull them just a little farther, to fling them through the air-- not birdlike, exactly, but not far off.   
  
It was freeing.   
  
In a way, they were both now chained down more than they’d ever been-- chained to each other. But it was like… Well, Eddie couldn’t help thinking, a little nonsensically, that it was kind of like some of those love songs that equated a relationship to both imprisonment and freedom somehow. It made sense if he didn’t think about it too hard (and he didn’t).   
  
The cool night air was nice where it whipped through Eddie’s hair, around the mask Venom had made for him, which sat warm and flush against his face like a layer of paint. They hopped from rooftop to chimney to power pole, chasing down Mr. Belvedere’s scent as it wound downtown through the blighted urban landscape near the edge of the city.   
  
“Ugh, I hope he didn’t cross the border again,” Eddie said as they clung to the side of an old business office, half disused because anyone who could afford it had moved their businesses closer to the city center.   
  
Venom cast around, smelling or sensing or whatever it was that he did, and then he echoed into Eddie’s mind, _‘No, he is near.’_ He pointed them in the direction of an overgrown schoolyard. Even from a distance of several blocks, they could see lights flickering in the abandoned building. They began the descent from the height they’d climbed to, and smoothly made their way across the rooftops, dropping into the space between the chainlink fence of the school and the edge of the apartment complex that neighbored it. Eddie’s heart did beat a little quickly as they jumped a story or two to the ground, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been; by that point, he had faith in what they could do, even without Venom reassuring him that it was okay. The symbiote’s body absorbed whatever shock there was from the fall.   
  
“Is he in the yard?” Eddie asked quietly, pushing through a hole in the chainlink and weaving through tall weeds that had grown up bigger than a full grown man. There was a spare thought in the back of his mind to be wary of snakes, but he (or maybe it was Venom) laughed at it. That wasn’t likely to be much of a danger to them.   
  
_‘Further,’_ Venom said, nudging Eddie to the left slightly, closer to the entrance of the building, the side door with its windows busted out.   
  
From here he could see that the flickering light inside was firelight, something larger than candles. Barrels, probably. Fire pits, the kind favored by the homeless in the cold corners of the city where power was unreliable. “I think there are people living here,” Eddie idly commented, stepping carefully through the underbrush that had taken over the field. He knew that people were having a hard time these days, that the city’s edges had become crowded with those who couldn’t afford to live in the safer zones but couldn’t risk living outside the sonic barrier either. But holed up in midtown with his well-to-do roommates, he hadn’t really seen much of it first-hand.   
  
_‘Yes,’_ Venom confirmed. _‘Many people. Cold, unhappy.’_  
  
“Yikes,” Eddie muttered, for lack of better response. It made him uneasy, the thought of that many people homeless, taking refuge in dusty old ruined buildings like this-- and the fact that he was about to intrude upon their meager space. Suppose they didn’t take well to trespassers? (Forget the fact that they didn’t own the place; squatters’ rights were in full effect, especially if there were fifteen of them and only one of you.)   
  
_‘Twenty-two,’_ Venom said, correcting his estimate in a way that did nothing to make him feel any better. _‘We can take them.’_  
  
Eddie laughed under his breath. “Y’know, I really don’t want to ‘take’ anyone except Mr. Belvedere, so maybe we could just avoid letting anyone know we’re here.”   
  
It seemed that Venom was more in the mood for a fight, still riled up from the rooftop free-running, but he conceded and pointed the way. Mr. B was close-- but he was inside the building, so despite his best instincts, Eddie pushed the door open and let them inside, beyond glad that the thing didn’t squeak.   
  
“Which way?” he whispered, turning left down the hallway when he felt the symbiote’s nudge. His footsteps echoed slightly and he cringed, until the noise faded to a soft barefoot padding. He glanced down and found the alien had coated his feet with the black ooze, effectively muffling them. “Thanks,” he said, and Venom twitched an internal smile at him. Eddie stood up straight and slowly strode through the halls, avoiding the desire to sneak because he didn’t want to raise any immediate red flags if someone should stumble upon him. The best way to avoid confrontation was to act like you belonged, so instead of rushing past the open doorways of classrooms people had taken as their own semi-private apartments, he just walked past, giving the various inhabitants no more than a glance.   
  
Several long straightaways and a handful of turns found them at the open doorway to what had once been a counselor’s office, according to the plaque on the wall. _‘He’s here,’_ Venom said. _‘There is one human. Feeble. Not a threat.’_  
  
‘Not a threat’ sounded promising, but he didn’t want to scare any feeble old people to death, so Eddie slowly poked his head in instead of hurrying to grab Mr. B, despite his interest in getting out of the place. It was an interior room; the only lighting came from candles-- though quite a few were strewn about the room, on the desk and on shelves and the floor. In the dim, flickering light, an old woman sat cross-legged on the floor, gently petting Mr. Belvedere as he gorged himself on a can of wet cat food. She looked up when Eddie took the first half step into the room.   
  
“This your cat?” she asked, looking at him with sharp eyes.   
  
“Yeah. Uh, yes ma’am,” Eddie stammered. “I mean he’s my roommate’s, but yeah.”   
  
She smiled and looked down at Mr. B. “I _thought_ he was a little too clean.” Glancing up at Eddie, she asked, “What’s his name?”   
  
“Mr. Belvedere,” Eddie told her, cringing just the very slightest bit because it was such a corny name for a cat and he’d always felt a little embarrassed having to tell people. He wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed for himself, or for Mr. B.   
  
The old lady laughed, but she seemed to like the name. “For the dog, or for the butler?”   
  
“I, uh, have no idea.” Eddie grinned and shrugged helplessly. He’d never thought to ask where the name had come from. Inside, Venom smirked at him for being caught off guard, but he nudged him forward. They were here for a reason, and that reason was not standing around in the late-evening chill and chatting with a homeless lady. They didn’t want to keep Anne waiting any longer than they had to.   
  
“Well, he’s a very sweet cat,” the lady told him. “Might be best to keep him inside. Pest control comes ‘round and picks up all the strays every so often. Real worried about parasites, I guess.”   
  
“So I’ve heard,” Eddie said. He took another few steps into the small room and stooped down to pick the cat up. “Alright, Mr. B. Your mom’s worried about you.”   
  
Mr. B wasn’t having it though. For all that he’d taken to Eddie over the past few days, he was apparently very uninterested in being taken away from his canned kitty-food delicacy, desperate to finish his snack before he went back to fresh chicken every day of his life. Chuckling as he growled, the old lady said, “Why don’t you let him finish that off? My baby went missing a few weeks back. If he doesn’t eat it, it’ll just go to waste.”   
  
Eddie didn’t really want to hang around, but he didn’t want to give Mr. B any more reasons to scratch him all to hell either (even though he stood very little chance of really sustaining any damage; it still wasn’t fun). And the old lady seemed friendly enough, so he glanced around the room and sat down on a ratty ottoman a few feet away. He looked around at her small collection of worldly possessions. Aside from the candles, there wasn’t a whole lot, but it did seem… cozy enough. There was a small couch in the corner-- a loveseat, draped in mismatched moth-eaten blankets and pillows, which he assumed functioned as her bed. There was a shopping basket, filled with a variety of things like soap, toilet paper, a hairbrush. A backpack sat on the floor near the head of the couch-bed, but it was zipped shut. Other than that, there were a few pieces of furniture, like the desk that had probably come with the room, and was maybe only still here because it was too cumbersome to get out of the narrow doorway. It was pushed back against the wall, and underneath it was a stack of cat food cans.   
  
That was the most curious thing. They didn’t sell any kind of pet food in the city anymore, since keeping animals was illegal. “You been carting those around for ten years?” he asked with a chuckle, nodding in the direction of the pyramid of ‘patés’ and ‘meaty bits’.   
  
“I haven’t been homeless for ten years,” the old woman said, shaking her head at him but smiling all the same. “No, I imagine these came from outside. Lots of valuables just sitting around, the way the youngsters tell it.”   
  
“Outside,” Eddie repeated. “You mean someone went out into the wilds to scavenge you some _cat food?”_   
  
She waved a hand at him. “I’m sure that’s not what they went out _for,”_ she told him. “But some of the kids liked my Lissa, so they kept an eye out for me while they were hunting for things they could use.”   
  
“Huh,” Eddie said, a little bit out of his depth again. That was… news to him (though he wasn’t sure why). People really just went outside? They just _went out there?_ Because they wanted to?   
  
_‘Lots of people, outside of the city,’_ Venom told him, smirking dangerously. _‘Plenty of snacks.’_  
  
Eddie couldn’t respond to that right now, but he shuddered, even though he could feel that the symbiote was mostly joking. He knew that there had to be a fair number of people leaving the city, because the parasites needed _someone_ to turn into the consistent stream of zombies. That was why the radio was always playing public service announcements about staying inside; the idea was that the parasites would eventually die out if the humans didn’t give them anything to eat. But Eddie had always thought it was just travelers who left the city-- people going from one safe-haven to another, and usually traveling by car. Were times really that bad that people felt it necessary to leave safety and go out where the monsters lived, just in hopes of finding something worthwhile in the abandoned suburbs?   
  
_‘Yes,’_ Venom said. _‘Had an old host before, a scavenger. She had many friends, all the same. Always searching.’_ _  
__  
_ “Feels familiar,” Eddie muttered. Outcast scavengers, always looking for something to eat and some place to call home. He guessed that wasn’t so unlike the parasites.   
  
The old lady nodded, in response to the conversation she thought they were having. “I guess we’re all hunting for something these days, aren’t we? Even you?”   
  
Snapping back to attention, Eddie said, “Uh, yeah. I guess so.”   
  
“What are you hunting for?” the lady asked, her smile very gentle.   
  
Eddie blanked. That was kind of a big question. “Um. I dunno,” he said, shifting his folded hands over his knees. “A purpose, maybe? Most of the time I’m just trying to get from one day to the next.”   
  
“I know how it is,” she said, nodding. “And that’s a good enough purpose, ‘til you find something else.”   
  
_‘Survival is our purpose,’_ Venom commented, and Eddie just hummed.   
  
They sat in relative silence for the next minute or two while Mr. B ate and licked the can clean. (There was no way he was hungry when Eddie had fed him hardly two hours before, but canned food was apparently just that good.) When the cat was finally just about done and set to licking his paws and cleaning his face, Eddie stood from the lumpy ottoman and dug through his pocket for his wallet.   
  
“You think I could buy a couple of those cans?” he asked, nodding toward the pyramid stack. “He might be less likely to run away from home if I can bribe him with a snack every so often.”   
  
The lady nodded magnanimously. “Take as many as you want. I’d rather they go to good use.”   
  
Eddie handed her a twenty (it was all he had left at the moment) and bent down to stuff a few cans in his pockets before _carefully_ picking up Mr. Belvedere and tucking him inside his jacket. “Thanks for looking out for Mr. B,” he said.   
  
“It was my pleasure,” the woman told him. “I’d say ‘anytime’, but hopefully I’ll never see him again. You keep him safe, alright?”   
  
“Will do,” Eddie said with a nod, and left the room. He retreated back the way they’d come in, hugging his jacket around the lump of cat that purred comfortably on his chest.   
  
The walk back was considerably longer and less eventful than the journey there; Eddie was nowhere near enough of an idiot to try flying through the air with a cat strapped to his chest, even one that seemed to be in a good mood. So they strolled through the city streets instead. Maybe it was a little more than a stroll, because they still had a goal in mind and contraband in hand, but they didn’t especially hurry.   
  
_‘Why pay the old woman?’_ Venom asked when they were about halfway home. Eddie wondered if he’d been stewing on the question or if it had just occurred to him. _‘She would have let us have the food for free.’_  
  
It hadn’t been an entirely conscious decision, honestly. It was just something he felt like he had to do, after seeing the state she lived in. “I guess I just… felt sorry for her?” Venom didn’t respond to that. Eddie could feel him thinking, but he couldn’t parse it. They continued on in relative silence, the city’s ever-present noises a backdrop to their quiet thoughts. They were a few blocks from home when the symbiote spoke up again.   
  
_‘Do you wish to help_ every _sad human you see?’_  
  
The phrasing somehow put him in mind of when he was a little kid, and he’d try to move all the little earthworms off the sidewalk when they wriggled out of the dirt after a rain. If they stayed there, he knew they’d dry out in the sun, or get stepped on by uncaring travelers. ‘You can’t save them all,’ his mom had told him, and he didn’t realize until later that what she was really saying was that it was a waste of time to bother. He knew that; even as a little kid he knew that, because plenty often enough he’d throw a worm into the grass just to watch it squirm back out again. It didn’t stop him from trying. It didn’t even occur to him to stop.   
  
He was more than old enough by now to have internalized that bleak truth, that there would always be people suffering, no matter how hard you tried. And sometimes there was nothing you could do to help someone. (He’d _been_ one of those people for a while, just hanging on. Couldn’t hardly help himself.) That didn’t stop him from _wanting_ to. Because sometimes you _could_ help, and maybe that didn’t mean much to the world at large, but it meant something to that person.   
  
So yeah. Somewhere deep in the part of him that wasn’t tired all the time, yeah, he did want to help everyone. “I guess so,” he answered, and he genuinely expected Venom to ridicule him for it. But all the symbiote gave him was a sort of acknowledging hum that didn’t feel very judgmental, and Eddie wasn’t going to complain.   
  
It was only a few more minutes before they were back at the apartment, and as soon as he started unlocking the door it was pulled open, Anne right on the other side. She pulled him in and shut the door behind them and asked, “Did you find him?”, her eyes wide with fearful hope.   
  
He unzipped his jacket and handed her the sleepy cat, who she immediately pulled into a tight hug, rubbing her face into his fur. Eddie considered telling her that she might not want to do that, considering where all he’d been that night, but she seemed happy and he wasn’t going to interrupt their sweet reunion. He stood there kind of awkwardly until she’d had enough fur in her face to convince herself that Mr. Belvedere was okay.   
  
“Thank you,” she said, sighing, releasing some of the tension she’d probably held the whole hour or so that they were gone. “I mean it’s your fault he got out in the first place, but I’m glad you found him.”   
  
“Oh yeah, not a problem,” Eddie replied, roughly half sarcastic.   
  
Anne readjusted Mr. B so he was slouched over her shoulder like a baby (and for his part, he put up with it like a champ, even seeming to like it a little). “It wasn’t, huh?” she asked. She gave Eddie a once-over and then stared at him with some level of suspicion, like she was waiting for the symbiote to pop out. (He wasn’t going to do that though, not while she was still so on-edge.) “So how did it go?”   
  
“Fine,” Eddie said with a shrug. “Yeah, it was… fine.”   
  
“Uh huh…” Anne leveled an impassive stare at him. “And the thing’s still behaving? The parasite. The… symbiote?”   
  
_‘Hmph,’_ Venom thought at Eddie, squirming not unlike a passive-aggressive cat.   
  
‘Behaving’ was kind of a loaded term and really depended on what she _meant_ by that. Submissive? Well-trained? No. But he was keeping his promise not to hurt Eddie, and so far they hadn’t gone full zombie and tried to eat anyone’s brain, so for the most part the answer was ‘yes’. “More or less,” he said.   
  
Pursing her lips, Anne nodded solemnly. She turned and wandered over to the couch, where she sat down on the arm. The shattered lamp had been cleaned up, as had the rest of the fallen books and other miscellaneous debris. She took a deep breath and let it out, then looked over at Eddie, who had followed a few paces behind. “So I guess you’re serious about letting it stay?”   
  
“No question,” Eddie said without giving himself a moment to reanalyze the situation. He didn’t feel like he needed to. At this point, even if he didn’t _like_ Venom (and he was still a little up in the air about that. _‘Rude,’_ Venom said with a semi-playful feeling like blowing a raspberry. _‘I like you.’)_ , there would still be a lot more reason for them _not_ to separate. It might only irreparably damage Eddie, but it would likely kill the symbiote, and the process would probably be excruciatingly painful. Even if Venom somehow survived it, if Eddie just _convinced_ the alien to leave him alone and he went and found a new host, he’d just end up at best a parasite on some animal, and at worst a string of hopeless zombies. Even _if_ they didn’t get along alright (and they seemed to, so far), Eddie would be willing to keep Venom if only to allay all those other circumstances. It would be the least of many evils.   
  
But he wasn’t going to explain all of that to Anne, when she probably just wanted to know what kind of situation she was going to have to prepare for. Always goal-oriented, she was, and that suited Eddie just fine for the moment.   
  
“Okay,” she said, sighing. She stroked Mr. Belvedere’s fur idly, looked off into the middle-distance of the living room, and then glanced back at Eddie from the corner of her eye. “I’m still… not sure about this. It seems like trouble just waiting to happen. But it’s late, so I guess we can all talk about it later. Dan’s already asleep. He said he doesn’t mind you staying-- as long as you _tell us_ if anything happens.” She stood up and faced him properly then, giving him that stare that probably cowed criminals in court all day long. “You got that?”   
  
“I got that,” Eddie said, bowing his head and holding up his hands as he smiled appeasingly.   
  
“Does _he_ get it?” she asked, nodding pointedly at Eddie’s chest.   
  
The symbiote’s oily body bubbled up out of Eddie’s chest, and Venom’s face came out so it could nod obediently at Anne. _“Got it,”_ he said.   
  
Satisfied, Anne nodded as well. “Alright,” she said, turning towards the bedroom. “I’m going to bed. You-- you guys sleep well. And, for the love of god, please try not to do anything weird.”   
  
“Sure,” Eddie said, rather desperate himself for the rest of the night to be as quiet and unremarkable as possible. “Goodnight.”   
  
_“Goodnight, Anne,”_ Venom echoed.   
  
She gave the symbiote a somewhat dead-eyed stare over her shoulder. “That still freaks me out. But, thanks.” Hitching Mr. B further up onto her shoulder, she slid into the dimly-lit bedroom and closed the door behind her.   
  
Sighing, Eddie went over and collapsed onto the couch, leaning back and closing his eyes. “Well, today sucked,” he said tiredly.   
  
_“I thought it was good,”_ Venom countered, a bubbly feeling welling up in their chest as the symbiote’s face came around to stare at him. It wobbled a little-- or maybe it was just that its amorphous form was never entirely still.   
  
Eddie hummed. “Yeah… I guess it wasn’t _that_ bad. Could’ve been a lot worse.”   
  
_“Best day of my life,”_ Venom said, and at first Eddie was surprised by it, but when he took half a second to think about it, he realized that kind of made sense. This was what the symbiote had been looking for all its life, right? Or at least since it came to Earth. They _were_ aliens, right? The ‘official report’ stated they’d come from the comet that had crashed all those years before, but Eddie doubted that anyone had actually spoken to one of the creatures to come to that conclusion, which made it really little better than an assumption. But even if they absolutely were aliens, that didn’t mean they knew literally anything about them except that they weren’t from Earth. He wondered if they had a true home planet, and how they’d gotten here in the first place. He wondered _why_ they’d come, and if they’d researched planets before deciding on Earth. He wondered--   
  
Before he could figure out exactly what he wanted to ask, Venom’s toothy face came up close and he growled, _“Hungry. Let’s eat.”_   
  
Eddie wanted to protest, maybe just because he didn’t want the alien to get too comfortable with dictating their schedule, but he was suddenly hungry too. Not too starving, but definitely ready for dinner. “Yeah, ok, not a bad idea,” he said, pushing up from the couch, even though his body was feeling heavy with the weight of the day. “I’ll see what we’ve got, but I think you exhausted our stock of meat this morning.”   
  
_“Let’s get more,”_ the symbiote suggested, as if ‘getting more’ was really all that simple of a matter. He seemed to scoff at Eddie’s reluctance. _“Not difficult. Take the bike. Go to the store. Get meat.”_  
  
Rolling his eyes, Eddie said, “Yeah, but you’re forgetting one thing. Money. I’m just about bankrupt until I get another job.”   
  
He could feel Venom frowning, even if Venom’s face didn’t really move that much, the symbiote trying to wrap his head around the concept of paying for things like it was some sort of puzzle. Annoyed but unwilling to admit defeat, he suggested, _“Lots of people outside. Easy to find a snack.”_  
  
Eddie just rolled his eyes at the suggestion. He wasn’t even going to dignify it with a response. Instead he pulled open the fridge and started to rummage through it. There was a lot of stuff in there but most of it was Anne’s, or Dan’s, or shared items he didn’t think would make much of a meal (especially now that his body was so protein-obsessed) like condiments. Sighing, he shuffled the items back into place and closed the door, trying to remember what they had in the cabinets.   
  
Venom sprouted a little arm and reached up to open the freezer door, even as Eddie was walking away from it, his neck stretching so he could stay uncannily in place as Eddie moved. _“Tater tots,”_ he said, grabbing the remainder of the package they’d opened earlier and tossing it at Eddie, who probably only had the reflexes to catch it because Venom’s own sense of perception was feeding into his.   
  
He frowned down at them. “We had tots earlier,” he complained, but since he didn’t have a lot of better ideas, he poured the rest of the package on to a cookie sheet and slid it into the oven with a shrug. While the tots cooked up, he scrubbed a couple of dishes, as Venom looked over his shoulder like a curious parrot.   
  
_“Hungry,”_ he whined, as Eddie was rinsing off a handful of forks. The oven still had a few minutes left on the timer, and Eddie was distinctly not interested in eating undercooked tater tots. The crispy crunch was the selling point.   
  
“Just wait.”   
  
Venom grumbled noiselessly, the feeling echoing inside of Eddie instead of through the room. _“When will we get more meat?”_  
  
Rolling his eyes, Eddie said, “When I get another job, I told you. ‘Til then you’re just gonna have to learn to like packaged foods, because I think all I’ve got is a box of Lucky Charms in the cabinet.”   
  
There was a definite feeling of a pout coming from the symbiote, even though he didn’t say anything, but Eddie’s intention to tell him to suck it up was interrupted by Anne coming out of the bedroom in her pajamas. She looked a little bit surprised to see them there, but only the slightest bit. Schooling her expression to neutral, she went to the fridge for a bottle of water, glancing over at where Eddie was still finishing up a batch of dishes, and at the oven and its nearly complete tots.   
  
Raising an eyebrow, she asked, “You need some grocery money?”   
  
A soft shiver of embarrassment ran through Eddie. He dried off his hands and turned to her to say, “Oh, uh, nah. I’ll be fine until my next job, but thanks,” at the same time that Venom said simply, _“Yes.”_ Eddie turned to him (as much as was possible, since he was hovering at Eddie’s shoulder) and frowned in betrayal.   
  
She looked between them, clearly not believing Eddie’s comforting lie, and then opened the fridge again, pulling out a foam container of leftovers, which she held out to them. “Shrimp scampi. You want it?”   
  
Venom wasted no time in plucking the box from Anne’s hand and sneaking his little arm-tendril in to pull a cold shrimp into his razor-toothed mouth. Pleasure rolled through them, even as Eddie swatted at the thing’s head. “Hey!” he said, the very lightest of rebukes. To Anne, he grinned apologetically and said, “Thanks. He seems to really prefer meat. I mean, I think he’ll eat other stuff, but he doesn’t like it much.”   
  
Anne shrugged. “That’s not surprising. I wouldn’t try to feed Mr. Belvedere tater tots. Specialized pets have specialized diets.”   
  
Venom stopped eating leftover shrimp long enough to look up at Anne in offended surprise, his big white eyes widening and then narrowing in quick succession. _“Not a pet!”_ he said indignantly, before returning to his food. Anne shared a knowing look with Eddie. Cats liked to think they weren’t pets either.   
  
Before Venom could eat all the shrimp and leave none for Eddie (he kind of thought it all probably went to roughly the same place anyway, but he wanted to be able to taste some if he could), he snatched the box out of the symbiote’s little hand and dumped the contents on a plate so he could microwave it. When the food was slowly rotating in the microwave (and Venom was busy staring at it), Eddie turned back to Anne to say goodnight and thank her again, and that was when he finally caught sight of the ring on her finger, glinting dully in the dim light.   
  
She saw him looking and glanced down herself, as if surprised to see it there. (Eddie guessed she probably would be, for at least a few days, the same as he’d be jumping when he saw Venom or one of his tentacles from the corner of his eye.)   
  
“Oh, right,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed but in a pleased sort of way. “Dan asked me to marry him. That’s why he wanted to go out to dinner.”   
  
Eddie’s eyes widened in semi-faux-surprise. “Congratulations,” he said, and he felt like there was probably more he ought to be able to say, but no other words were coming to him at the moment. Most of the usual platitudes would have felt hollow, and anything he had to say that was real and honest was probably not totally appropriate. There was one more simple truth that he could add though. “I’m really happy for you guys.”   
  
She cast her eyes down and smiled to herself. “Thanks. Me too,” she said. 

Eddie didn't need to hear her say it to know this was what she really wanted in life-- a partner who was on her level and she could trust to be there for her indefinitely. Every so often he was regretful that that wasn't him, if only because it felt like yet another failure, but he had enough humility to accept it, and he cared for Anne enough to want what was best for her. 

“Y'know, I'm sure it's all gonna work out great,” he told her, and he wasn't sure what he was trying to reassure her for when it wasn't  _ her _ life that had just gotten unpredictably weird, but it felt like the thing to do, and she seemed to appreciate it. She gave him a warm smile, as tinged with sadness as her smiles for him always were, and patted him on the arm before heading back to bed. 

The microwave dinged and it wasn't as if he'd forgotten where he was or what all had happened today, but if he had it certainly would have snapped him back to reality, especially as Venom impatiently reached for the tater tots (he'd have gone for the shrimp but Eddie was blocking the microwave door with his body) and burned his little tentacle hand on the cookie sheet, dropping it with a hiss. It only clattered around in the oven instead of falling all over the floor like it probably should have with the luck Eddie was having today. The symbiote whirled around and gave his host a betrayed look, like it was Eddie who had burned him. 

Surprising himself, Eddie laughed. (It wasn't like Venom was really  _ hurt,  _ so he didn't think it was  _ too _ callous.) He put his head in his hands and just laughed-- not loudly, just a quiet, slightly hysterical series of chuckles that faded off into an amused sigh. Venom pouted more but that just made the whole ordeal funnier. 

_ “Why are you laughing?” _ the symbiote asked, pushing Eddie's limbs to walk backwards a step so he could open the microwave and see if that one proved less dangerous. (A wave of satisfaction flowed through them when he managed to take the plate of shrimp without pain.) 

Eddie shook his head at the question. “I don't really know,” he said. He grabbed an oven mitt so he could retrieve the tots and set the sheet down on the stove top. “Sometimes that's all you can do.” 

He could feel that Venom thought he was full of shit, but he didn't argue the point. The psychology of human trauma response was hard enough for other  _ humans _ to understand. He didn't want to bother explaining it to an alien who didn't know not to touch a hot pan. Not yet, at least. 

Shrimp and tater tots might have been a weird dinner combination but it was fairly satisfying, and it left the both of them warm and ready to turn in. Venom didn't entirely  _ get _ the concept of sleeping but his floating face and various little tendrils all withdrew back into the shelter of Eddie's body and faded back slightly out of their shared conscience while Eddie yawned and wandered to his bedroom to kick off his clothes and burrow into his bed, pulling the sheets around him.    
  
Tomorrow would be a new day, and unless he woke up to find this all had been a very strange dream (he still wasn’t sure yet whether he kind of hoped for that or not), it would be a very different kind of day than the one he’d woken up to most recently. It was funny how things could change so quickly. Yesterday he’d been worried about losing his only two good friends and being alone forever; now there was an alien living in his brain.    
  
...The two were maybe not entirely compatible concerns but the comparison made sense to what was left awake of Eddie’s drowsy conscience.    
  
Thinking in idle circles over the events of the day, he slowly fell into a deep and restful sleep. 


	7. Chapter 7

He woke with a feeling of confusion. There wasn’t any sort of dream though, no half-remembered story clinging to the last dregs of sleep and making it hard for him to rejoin the waking world. He didn’t think he’d dreamed at all that night, which was sort of a blessing. And it wasn’t even that he was struggling to remember all the weird shit that had happened the day before, because he remembered it easily, like a simple fact that was obvious to him as opposed to some sudden realization that hit him like a ton of bricks. He wasn’t surprised to realize that any of it was real. He’d been infected by an alien parasite, and luckily it was one that got along with him, and that was that.   
  
The confusion was more of a physical sort, because as he regained awareness of his body Eddie also realized that he felt a bit restrained. Stretching and yawning, he looked down at his arm and found the pale skin covered in ropy black tendrils that looped around his forearm and wrist and stretched down to latch on to other parts of his body in a meaningless way, like little vine runners reaching and curling around whatever they could find. When he stretched out, some of the lines snapped and withdrew back into him, while the others pulled back of their own accord before they could be broken, some melting back into him while others coiled tighter around his limbs until his skin was more ink than paper.   
  
Curious, he touched it with his other hand, which was spotty with its own oily covering. He could tell the black stuff wasn’t his own skin; it had a different texture (although not as different as he expected), not all that unlike warm leather. The odd thing though was that he could feel it just as if it were his own skin, or so near as to make no difference. It stood out in slight relief from his own flesh, but to a bystander he imagined it would have looked pretty natural.   
  
He had no idea what possessed him (...an unfortunate phrase, perhaps) but Eddie’s next course of action was to lean down and feel the dark skin with his lips. There the difference was more obvious, yet even more difficult to place, the texture supple and soft, smooth and less solid than his fingertips had thought, yielding in an almost liquid way.   
  
It didn’t taste like anything, but licking it did give his slowly-awakening brain the most acute feeling of embarrassment, and that was what brought him fully to consciousness, probably because it undulated when he caressed it with his tongue, bringing to his full attention that it was not just a mobile new set of modular clothes, but actually the physical body of his new inescapable roommate.   
  
_‘Hungry?’_ Venom asked from somewhere deep in the pits of his mind.   
  
Eddie pointedly ignored the question and got out of bed to go about his morning routine. A shower, change of clothes, then breakfast. Or… Maybe not a shower today, he thought, hesitant at the idea of being fully naked in front of this new… friend, as if Venom was a human who understood or cared about nudity in the slightest. A day without a shower wouldn’t kill him. So he went straight for the dresser instead, swapping underwear at probably record speed and getting jeans and a t-shirt on nearly as fast. Venom was curious in the back of his mind, but Eddie distracted him by focusing on the idea of breakfast instead, which was more than enough to make the symbiote surge to the forefront of their conscience and ask gleefully what they were having.   
  
Lucky Charms was not the answer the alien was either expecting or hoping for, but it was what he got, and he pouted as Eddie enjoyed a bowl of marshmallow-laden corn-puffs.   
  
“They were a big favorite when I was a kid,” he said, spooning up just the right amount of marshmallow and cereal to make the sweet accent last the whole bowl.   
  
_‘Humans have bad taste,’_ Venom complained. _‘Unrefined.’_   
  
“Says the one who wants to eat brains,” Eddie retorted through a mouthful. He plucked a single marshmallow off of the edge of the bowl and held it up. “Sure you don’t wanna try?”   
  
He could feel Venom’s skepticism and pride, how he wanted to maintain his stance that anything not meat-or-chocolate-or-tater tots had to be absolutely disgusting, but his apparently curious nature got the best of him and he materialized a face so he could swipe the marshmallow out of Eddie’s fingers with a long and weirdly prehensile tongue. There was silence as the little sugar bit melted, and then Venom turned to look at him.   
  
_“It’s okay,”_ he said.   
  
Over the course of the meal, he proceeded to steal several more whenever Eddie was looking down at his phone instead, proving well enough that either Lucky Charms marshmallows were more than ‘okay’, or symbiotes had bad taste as well.   
  
Even though he was fine to live off cereal and ramen for a while (and he thought he might even be able to convince Venom not to whine about it too much), Eddie was really hoping he’d have a message or two waiting for him when he woke up, job offers or responses from what felt like endless applications. Unfortunately, all he’d gotten over the course of the night was junk mail.   
  
(At very least, his phone still _worked._ The screen was a cracked mess, but it seemed to be just an aesthetic issue.)   
  
His disappointment must have been pretty obvious. _‘You’re upset?’_ Venom asked. _‘You want a job?’_   
  
“I _need_ a job,” Eddie replied, “if I’m gonna keep feeding you. And if we want a roof over our heads, I need to help with the bills. There’s only so long that Anne’ll let me freeload.”   
  
He didn’t say or even consciously think about his more specific and recent concerns regarding his roommates’ likelihood of gently coercing him into getting his own place because of the whole marriage thing, but Venom was proving far too good at following the thinnest of threads in Eddie’s mind, to find all his hidden reasoning. _‘Afraid to be alone,’_ he mentioned, like his host’s deepest worries were just commonplace topics that he could unearth casually. Tact was clearly something the alien hadn’t come with pre-installed.   
  
“No,” Eddie said adamantly. “It’s just hard to pay rent on your own, y’know? It’s gotten expensive to live in the city.”   
  
Venom could almost certainly tell that Eddie was in denial, but he kept up the pretense for the moment at least and continued the train of thought Eddie had started. He gave him the feeling of an owlish blink. _‘Then live out of the city.’_  
  
“Like, what? On a farm or something?” Eddie asked. That wasn’t something he’d ever considered for more than a spare minute. Farming and other out-of-town jobs were highly profitable these days, but they carried a certain risk that Eddie had never been willing to entertain, not since he stopped hunting. Even though they were pretty well protected with both disruptors and armed guards, it always felt far too scary to be that far from the city, that surrounded by wild land and the zombies that roamed them. It was a good job, but better suited to those with stronger nerves than his had been over the recent years.   
  
_‘No. Out,’_ Venom said, explaining in visuals of dusty, quiet suburbs, rows and rows of houses that had once been beautiful and had been quickly left behind when a better guarantee of safety in the city came about. The mass exodus had left endless amounts of free real estate just ripe for the picking-- for anyone brave or desperate enough to live without the protection of barriers and crowds. Eddie had always thought that no one in their right mind would _go_ out there, let alone _live_ out there.   
  
Obviously Venom didn’t share Eddie’s reservations, because the way he thought about the wild overgrown area focussed on the wide-open space, the freedom, the privacy, and painted everything in a comfortable light that made Eddie think it was at worst a trick to get him to go put himself in peril so Venom could control him as he liked (the symbiote was wildly offended by the passing thought, but Eddie couldn’t help that his trust was hard to fully win), and at best just a symptom of the alien’s familiarity with the space outside the city. That was where he’d spent nearly all of his time on Earth, after all. The wilds were Venom’s home; of course he’d think fondly of them, when they’d never posed a threat to his well-being.   
  
Eddie gave a grimacing smile. “I mean, sure, if you want to get us killed.”   
  
_‘The others won’t attack,’_ Venom said, trying to assuage Eddie’s fears about zombies. Although he added with an air of not being quite as sure as either of them would have liked, _‘Never been attacked_ before.’   
  
“That’s… reassuring.” Eddie shook his head. “I think I’d rather stay in the city anyway. There’s food here.”   
  
_‘Not for poor people,’_ Venom said pointedly, spawning a tentacle and jabbing Eddie with it. He clearly didn’t like the idea of not eating.   
  
Eddie brushed him away and the tentacle melted back into him. “That’s why I’m trying to find a job.” He sighed, glancing down at his phone again, hoping maybe a new email or text had come in during the seven seconds he hadn’t been looking at it. “Guess it’s time to hit the pavement. Want a tour of the city?”   
  
Venom didn’t seem to really care one way or the other about the city unless food was involved, but since it was about food in kind of a roundabout way (“food requires money requires work requires job requires getting someone to hire them” was something he was starting to understand), he didn’t put up too much of a fuss-- especially since the other option was sitting around and doing chores and _not eating._   
  
Anne and Dan were both already gone for the day, so Eddie made extra sure that everything was in order before he left, checking on Mr. Belvedere and then double checking that he was secure. The cat responded very happily to seeing Eddie, and didn’t freak out in the slightest when Venom reached out to pat Mr. B’s fluffy head with a tendril, arching up into it. His purr vibrated through Venom and into Eddie, giving them a feeling of warmth that felt very familiar. It was a nice parting gift for the day.   
  
Out in the parking lot, Eddie debated whether to walk or take the bike, but the symbiote had a distinct preference, urging him towards the motorcycle as soon as it was in view.   
  
“You were here yesterday, weren’t you?” he asked, remembering the exaggerated calm that had overtaken him on the way home after his failed job, despite how uncomfortable he’d been feeling at the time. He usually liked riding; it was one of those things that he found kind of centering, the roar of the engine and the whipping wind drowning out everything but his own thoughts, the scenery flashing by, but it had been such a physically relieving feeling yesterday that it hardly compared.   
  
Venom hummed, remembering the sensation in a way that Eddie could sense. _‘It was nice.’_  
  
Fuel was another thing that he could scarcely afford, but it was hard to make the decision to _walk_ when it was obvious that the symbiote really wanted to take the motorcycle, and so did Eddie. If it was just him, maybe he would have had the will to deny himself, but…   
  
“You’re gonna be a really expensive roommate, aren’t you?” he asked, shaking his head in an affectionate sort of way and grabbing his helmet off the back. Venom didn’t feel the need to apologize, but Eddie wasn’t expecting it.   
  
The ride was nice, Venom thinking loudly but incoherently in his ear as they sped past people and buildings and street signs, all getting cleaner as they headed deeper into the city towards its populous and well-protected heart. They stopped a mile short of the second ring of disruptors, more because Eddie didn’t have any business up that way than because they wanted to avoid the discomfort of the sonic emitters. Most of the jobs he’d applied for were in the middle part of the city, where what he might consider the ‘normal’ people lived. Anyone posh enough to live or run a business inside the second ring probably wouldn’t be caught dead hiring someone like Eddie to even scrub their floors.   
  
Parking in the consumer business district, he took off his helmet and tied it back to his bike, and started down the street on a route that would take him past at least seven businesses he’d applied to in the past month, and another few whose owners or managers he knew. Venom people-watched as they went, periodically getting distracted by the smell of restaurants they passed. More than once, Eddie found himself inside the foyer of a cafe or diner before he realized he’d gotten bowled over by the hungry alien’s will and had to wrestle control of their shared body back away from him and march them back out into the street.   
  
“Look, I’m all out of cash,” he said, ducking his head as they passed a pungent Indian restaurant, trying to ignore the way his mouth watered. “We’re gonna have to wait ‘til we get home to eat, unless someone’s not only willing to hire us but also pay up-front.”   
  
The grumble Venom replied with was more annoyance than English, but Eddie caught something about it being stupid to starve when there was food _everywhere,_ and he knew Venom didn’t mean all the restaurants because his mouth was starting to water when their gaze lingered too long on people loitering outside buildings or in the mouths of alleyways. He shook his head and focused on what he was going to say to the next potential employer instead.   
  
The first few were all busts. One of them remembered his application but apologized that they weren’t hiring anymore. Another had apparently lost his application entirely. The third was perfectly cordial until they looked at his paper, but he could practically see it on their face as they read over his resume, the change in their reception when they read ‘ex-hunter, parasite damage’. They gave him a very fake smile and said they’d review it later and let him know. But he already knew what the answer was, so he didn’t bother getting his hopes up. He said thanks and waved goodbye and moved on to the next place. That one told him they were still in the process of sorting through applicants, which he believed because it was one of his more recent applications, and because the secretary who informed him looked casually disinterested instead of vaguely frightened. He chalked that up as a small victory, at the very least, and made a note in his phone to check in with them again soon.   
  
They were taking a backstreet route toward a small restaurant whose owner liked Eddie enough to maybe let him cover a busboy shift under the table, when Venom piped up with something different from the hungry whining he’d been doing since they started.   
  
_‘You know why the third job refused you?’_   
  
Eddie shrugged. “I mean, I can’t say for sure, but I think so. A lot of places don’t like hiring people who’ve been infected. The health problems are a liability or something.”   
  
Venom’s voice in his head was bright, the answer obvious to him. _‘Health is not a problem anymore. You’re almost healed. Only need one more good meal.’_  
  
In a way, Eddie had already known that. Venom had made it as obvious as he could, the night before, when he was trying to convince him. He’d felt the ‘stitches’, the damage repairing itself. It was nice to hear though, to hear the symbiote say what his doctors certainly never could. “That’s awesome,” he said, halfway to saying ‘thank you’ but not quite willing, somehow. “But I can’t really just go back and tell them the data’s wrong. I think I’ll just have to write that one off.” He walked another store-length or two before he added what he really felt. “...Besides, I don’t think the health issue is _really_ the issue. I think it’s really just the stigma. People are so scared of parasites they don’t even wanna come near someone who’s touched one.”   
  
_‘If they knew the truth,’_ Venom said with a dark chuckle, and Eddie responded in kind.   
  
“Yeah, I think we’d give more than a few people a heart attack.”   
  
Down the street, the restaurant he’d been holding out hope for was unfortunately full-staffed, leaving no extra work that they could part out for Eddie, no matter how much the owner liked him or felt sorry for him. “Su Yin on vacation next week,” Mr. Choi said in his usual broken English. “Come back then. Maybe I let you cover her shift.”   
  
Mr. Choi was a man of his word, so Eddie was sure he’d have at least _something_ for him to do then, but that still left him with a week to get through, and at most a couple quarters in his pocket, so he continued on. There were still a few shops in the area that were familiar enough with him that they might give him a job-- if not for good then at least for the day.   
  
(Being also a sympathetic man, Mr. Choi planted a bowl of chicken fried rice down in front of Eddie before he left. “Customer returned this. Said a fly landed on it. You want?” Eddie thought he might still accept it even if there was currently a fly _in_ it, so he gratefully chowed down, enjoying both the food and Venom’s reaction over trying something new. Not unexpectedly, he seemed to like it, and Eddie was starting to think the alien was maybe less of a picky eater than he’d originally thought.)   
  
Next was a florist he’d become friendly with some years ago, though he could hardly remember how. She shook her head as soon as Eddie came in. “Still riding that bike?” she asked, looking at him skeptically over her glasses. “You know I can’t have you doing flower deliveries on a motorcycle, Eddie.”   
  
“You don’t have anything solid you need delivered?” he asked, giving her a hopeful grin.   
  
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing that can’t go out with the other deliveries. And no, I don’t need help around here either. You’ll curse my flowers with that black thumb of yours.”   
  
He knew she meant it as a friendly joke, but it was unfortunately true so he didn’t fight it. He sighed and leaned on the counter. “I’m really strapped for cash this week,” he told her. “There isn’t _anything_ I can do? Clean your house? Babysit your kids?”   
  
Sighing, she folded her arms. “Don’t give me those puppy-dog eyes. Let me just… think about it a minute.” Eddie held his breath as she tapped at her computer, looking at the schedule for receiving and sending out orders, her frown growing tighter as she scrolled. After a minute or two she looked up at him apologetically. “I’m sorry. I really don’t have anything this week. Did you try China Wok?”   
  
Eddie nodded. “Just came from there. Choi’s out of work too. Guess I’ll just keep looking.”   
  
The florist reached across the counter to pat Eddie’s hand. “Hey, you’ll find something,” she said kindly. “You might just have to expand your horizons. It’s a changing world, Eddie. That means changing jobs. Maybe there’s something you can do that you’ve never considered before.”   
  
Humming, Eddie said, “Yeah, maybe,” though he had no idea where to start. If he’d never considered it before, what was going to make him consider it now? He thanked her with a wave and headed back out on to the street, wandering back towards where he’d parked.   
  
Venom was seething quietly under his skin, the symbiote seeming on the edge of words but apparently unsure what to say. Eddie appreciated the thought, at least, and it made him feel like he ought to reassure the alien. “Hey, don’t worry, I’ll think of something,” he said. It was a platitude, but he could feel that it helped.   
  
_‘We will find a way to buy meat,’_ Venom said in response, and Eddie almost laughed at the raw honesty of it. The symbiote didn’t quite get it yet, but he was on the right track, at least.   
  
When he returned to his bike, a spike of worry ran through him when he noticed a small slip of paper on the windshield. “Shit,” he said, expecting a parking ticket even though he was sure he’d been there less than the 6 hour limit. But to his immense relief, it was just a lottery ticket, probably blown there by the wind. He sighed. “Well, thank god for small mercies.”   
  
_‘What is that?’_  
  
“This?” Eddie turned the little orange ticket over, glancing over the row of numbers printed on the front. “It’s a lottery ticket. If it has the right numbers on it, you could win a bunch of money.”   
  
_‘Did you win?’_ Venom asked, with the childlike optimism of a creature who didn’t know that these things were either rigged or so rare that they might as well be.   
  
“Probably not. The chances are like one in a million. That’s really small,” he added, when he didn’t sense that Venom was properly cowed.   
  
_‘How do you know?’_   
  
Eddie frowned, looking down at the ticket. Chances were extraordinarily slim, but then again, the chances of he and Venom finding each other had been pretty low too, and Venom was right: he didn’t know. To that end, he pocketed the ticket and decided he’d stop by a gas station or something to check it before heading home for the evening. It couldn’t hurt.   
  
He had two more stops to check in with before he had to start thinking of new places to apply to, but unfortunately neither of those had any work for him either, which didn’t surprise him. Trying to keep his disappointment in check, he took a deep breath, promised himself he’d try again in the morning, and started home, stopping by Mrs. Chen’s convenience store first, just so he could follow through on his last lead-- even if it probably was a dud.   
  
“Evening, Mrs. Chen,” he said, approaching the counter.   
  
“Eddie,” she replied, not looking up from her book until she realized he wasn’t going further into the store. “Not buying anything tonight?”   
  
“Nope,” he said with a cheerful smile. “I just wanted to check this lotto ticket.”   
  
He handed it over and she looked at him judgmentally as she took it. “Out of work but you’re spending on gambling? Not a good sign, Eddie.”   
  
He scoffed, very slightly offended that she would think he’d fallen that low. (Not that she was far off; he could see himself getting that desperate if things went a little differently.) “I didn’t buy it,” he told her. “Just found it on the street and thought I’d see if I was lucky.”   
  
She scanned the ticket and said, “Oh, well, good. Because it’s not a winner. At least you didn’t lose anything.”   
  
Sighing, he shrugged. “True enough. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know anyone who’s hiring, would you?”   
  
“You speak Chinese?” she asked.   
  
“...No?”   
  
Mrs. Chen blinked at him. “Then no I don’t.”   
  
She didn’t apologize, and to be honest Eddie was kind of relieved by her very matter-of-fact lack of sympathy. It was a nice break from people feeling sorry for him, even if he was deserving of pity. “Thanks anyway,” he told her, and they nodded at each other as he left. A man bumped into him roughly as they passed in the shop’s entrance, but Eddie didn’t look over his shoulder as he muttered ‘sorry’, heading out into the evening instead, his mind now desperately trying to reach for whatever was next in his too-empty schedule.   
  
He’d barely turned out onto the sidewalk though, before Venom spoke in his brain. _‘Eddie. That man is stealing from your friend.’_  
  
Eddie’s first thought in response was confusion over who the heck ‘his friend’ was, but he put two and two together quick enough to realize the symbiote meant Mrs. Chen. The man they’d just passed in the store was stealing from her? “What? How do you know?” he whispered, stepping back in the shadow of the building.   
  
_‘We can smell the fear,’_ Venom said, his voice full of a dangerous grin.   
  
He _could_ , Eddie realized then, with a pang of disgust. In the middle of a dirty city was not the ideal place to suddenly become aware of a super sense, but he knew now was not the time to dwell on it. He drew in a deep breath and tried to focus on what he could sense of the situation inside the store. He wasn’t sure if he was smelling them, or hearing them, or feeling the minute movement of their organs and muscles, but somehow he could see them. The man was holding a gun a foot in front of Mrs. Chen’s face. Mrs. Chen was shaking as she gathered money out of the register and slowly handed it over. Then the man put the gun back in his pocket and stalked out.   
  
There was a moment of indecision, just one very short moment, and then Eddie was following after the man, keeping pace with him as he turned corners into grungy alleyways. He lost sight of him a few times, but there was still a clear picture of the man in his head, like an infrared outline that he could chase.   
  
_‘Up,’_ Venom suggested, and Eddie didn’t hesitate to scale the brick wall and continue following the man from the rooftops. The height didn’t even register to Eddie, he was so focused on tracking this thief. He stayed low, leaping silently across rooftops, his steps padded by Venom’s sticky flesh.   
  
After a few minutes, the man stopped looking over his shoulder and paused in a back-alley corner by the back end of some warehouse or another. Eddie could almost feel Venom salivating, but in the hyperfocus to retrieve the stolen money he assumed the alien was just excited for the hunt, like an attack dog straining at its leash. That wasn’t unlike how Eddie felt; it wasn’t unlike how he’d used to feel, back when he went out in teams to the wilds to hunt down the parasites that were threatening them.   
  
Again it was something he’d always _known,_ but now he was seeing it with his own eyes; even inside the city, there were parasites preying on the innocent, camouflaged as humans. It wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do at all. Not when he had the ability to stop them.   
  
Quietly, he leapt down around the corner from where the man was lighting a cigarette. _‘Pull his feet out from under him,’_ Venom suggested, and that was exactly what Eddie did. He didn’t know how he was controlling the symbiote’s stringy tentacles, or if maybe the two of them were just so in sync that it _felt_ like he was the one doing it, but when he thought to spawn a black tendril from his arm and whip it around the corner to attach to the thief’s ankles, that’s what happened. Satisfied, he yanked with a strength that was not solely his ( _‘this is our strength’_ ) and the man yelped as he was thrown onto his back on the hard alley floor.   
  
_‘String his hands up,’_ Venom said, and there the thief’s hands went, attached to the wall with thick black goo binding his wrists.   
  
“Fuck,” the man groaned. He’d hit his head on the rough cement, knocking a lot of the fight out of him. He moaned in pain, choking on it as Eddie rounded the corner and came to stand in front of him.   
  
_“We’ll be taking back what you stole,”_ he said, and he was surprised that it came out in Venom’s voice, because he was almost sure it had been him who thought to speak. He thought he managed to keep the surprise off his face though; the thief looked appropriately scared, so his expression had to be at least as menacing as he intended.   
  
No response came from the thief except a frightened stammering. Obviously he couldn’t volunteer the money, since he was strung up like that and they had no intention of letting him loose, so Eddie spawned another tentacle and rifled through the man’s pockets until he found the wad of cash-- along with his wallet and the gun he’d used to threaten a little old lady. He took all of them, though he smashed the gun against the wall near the thief’s face, reveling in the way it shattered into broken pieces. Tucking the money and wallet into his own pockets, Eddie was about to turn and leave before he realized he couldn’t. He was still leaning over the thief, like a predator over prey, drawing nearer to him with a growl rumbling through his chest.   
  
_“Finally, a real meal,”_ Venom said, and Eddie was appalled to see a long tongue he knew was not his own slide out of his mouth, explaining why he spoke in the symbiote’s dark voice.   
  
‘Venom, no!’ he shouted in his own mind, pulling back on the mental reins, straining to get their shared body under control. It was like wrestling a bear, but finally Venom pulled his tongue back into his mouth and stood up straight, growling, though whether it was at Eddie for ruining his dinner, or at the thief in a gesture of warning, he wasn’t sure. Both was a fair guess.   
  
_“Don’t let us catch you again,”_ he said to the thief, who looked like he was maybe only barely hanging on to consciousness. _“We_ will _eat you next time.”_ Annoyed, he stalked off around the corner, scaling the wall to get them back up onto the roof before he faded back, and Eddie finally had full control of his body again-- or at least the illusion of it.   
  
Sitting down against the wall of the roof’s edge, Eddie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well that was something,” he said, staring off into the distance as he digested it all. Venom made a disgruntled noise, at which Eddie could only shake his head. “ _Sorry_ I didn’t let you _eat_ that guy. God, I really thought you were just joking before.”   
  
_‘Not joking,’_ Venom said unnecessarily, because obviously Eddie was aware of the truth now. _‘Humans are delicious. Full of nutrients.’_  
  
“Well I don’t know if you know this?” Eddie started. “But humans don’t eat other humans. That means _I_ don’t eat humans.”   
  
Pouting, Venom said, _‘You don’t have to eat them. I will.’_ He surged up over Eddie’s face again, growing his monstrous teeth and tongue into the supple black flesh he was wearing like a mask. Showing off, Venom snapped his jaw shut, teeth clicking loudly against each other. Eddie could still feel it, but it didn’t feel like _his_ mouth. At most it felt like he’d just got back from having some serious dental work done and his entire face was still numb.   
  
‘It’s still my body,’ he said, nudging Venom to get off his face. The symbiote complied, but not without feeling petulant about it.   
  
They didn’t talk about it more then, but Eddie was sure it was something they were going to have to discuss later. The symbiote still didn’t understand why they were going hungry when there was potential food at every turn. And in the case of this thief, he didn’t know how to explain why they couldn’t except that… killing was wrong? He didn’t think that was going to hold up well against the alien’s morals or lack-thereof.   
  
Putting the heavier conversation aside for now, they returned to the convenience store to find Mrs. Chen going about her business as if nothing had happened.   
  
“Hey, Mrs. Chen, are you okay?” Eddie asked, hurrying up to the counter, where the old Chinese woman was tidying up. She looked up at him and even though her expression wasn’t much different from usual, he could still see the sadness on her face.   
  
“Back again, Eddie?” she said, giving him a small wry smile. “I still don’t have any work for you.”   
  
“Uh, no,” Eddie said, rummaging through his pocket for the wad of bills. “I have something for you.” He handed her the cash, and then for good measure gave her the thief’s wallet as well. “I followed that guy, got it back for you. And, uh, I don’t think he’ll be bothering you again.”   
  
She stared down at the bills, opened the wallet to see the thug’s picture on the ID card inside, and then looked back up at Eddie in shock. “You followed him? What did you do?”   
  
“I just beat him up a little bit,” he said with a shrug.   
  
It was clear that Mrs. Chen was seeing him in an entirely new light now, gaping at him with her mouth open just slightly. “Are you hurt?”   
  
Eddie frowned. “Nah, I’m good.”   
  
Mrs. Chen seemed unconvinced, but she took a moment to count her money and stick it back in the till, then grab the wallet and stuff it under the counter. Then she looked at Eddie again, studying him. “I might know someone with a job for you after all,” she said, pulling up a scrap of paper and pen. “Give me your number. I’ll have them call you. And go pick out a snack.”   
  
Ten minutes later, they were on the way home, with a pack each of frozen corndogs and chicken nuggets, and a quiet promise from Mrs. Chen that she’d have someone call him soon. Apparently, he’d opened a new door. He just hoped it didn’t lead somewhere he wasn’t willing to go. (Venom, on the other hand, kind of hoped it did. What they’d done that evening was right up the symbiote’s alley, and he relished the idea of his host getting a job where they could use their combined abilities to kick some asses.) Eddie decided not to dwell on it though. It was always entirely possible that nothing would come of it anyway. It wasn’t going to stop him from continuing his job hunt. At least, tomorrow. 


	8. Chapter 8

Anne was home when they returned, curled up on the couch and sorting through stacks of documents. “Hey,” she said when they came in, lingering a little on the space _around_ Eddie’s face like she was looking for his clinger-on. “Did you have a job today?”   
  
“Uh, no, just job hunting,” Eddie told her, hanging up his keys and jacket.   
  
She gave him a sympathetically disappointed frown. “Any luck?”   
  
“Mm, not really. Everyone’s busy, but not busy enough to hire me,” Eddie said, going over to the kitchen to put their groceries away. He picked a few pieces out of each bag before shoving them in the freezer, tossing them somewhat haphazardly on a baking sheet. “Day was kind of a bust.”   
  
Grinning, Venom poked his head out and swiveled around to look at Anne. _“We caught a thief,”_ he told her smugly.   
  
Shocked disbelief washed over Anne’s face as her stare moved from the symbiote to Eddie. “And why do I get the feeling you weren’t going to tell me this?” she asked her roommate.   
  
Eddie shrugged, turning his back on her to slide the tray into the oven. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Some asshole stole a couple hundred from Mrs. Chen, so we just… followed him and, y’know, took it back.”   
  
“Oh Eddie…” Anne said, shaking her head. “You need to be careful!”   
  
_“We were in no danger.”_  
  
Glancing at Venom, Eddie nodded. “Yeah, it was fine, really. The guy was just some small-time crook. Gave it back as soon as we asked.”   
  
Eddie thought he ought to just stop lying, since people obviously never believed him, but they just kept letting him get away with it. Anne just sighed. “I just don’t want you getting hurt because you think you’re some kind of superhero all of a sudden. Or worse, someone finding out about… him.” She nodded at the symbiote’s floating face, looking pained. “If someone sees that, their first thought might not be ‘parasite’, but they’re going to know something’s wrong.”   
  
Venom turned to Eddie. _“We should have ate the thief.”_  
  
“Oh my god.” Eddie covered his face with his hands, exasperated. “No, V. We already talked about this. Eating people is off limits, even if they’re assholes.”   
  
_“He was worthless except for his organs.”_ Venom licked his lips-- or his teeth, anyway.   
  
Anne was still staring at them, distinctly unamused. “Are you _trying_ to give me second thoughts about letting you stay?” she asked, eyes narrow.   
  
Eddie held up his hands in a plea. “No, look, he’s just… kidding,” he lied. “Eating people isn’t really a thing. It’s just a joke.”   
  
_“Because Eddie is a coward,”_ Venom said, clacking his teeth at his host in a playful but challenging way. _“We need meat to survive.”_  
  
“And that’s why I’m trying to get a job.” Eddie crossed his arms, annoyed. “To feed you.”   
  
_“To feed us,”_ Venom corrected.   
  
Intent on changing the topic, Eddie ignored Venom and turned his attention to Anne to continue the conversation in the way he was most comfortable with. “I’ve got a couple things lined up for next week, so until then I’ll just keep searching, I guess.”   
  
Anne just blinked rapidly, the telltale sign that she was trying to sort through the bullshit she’d just heard. “Eddie, I swear to god if you get arrested for cannibalism, I’m pretending I’ve never met you.”   
  
“...That’s totally fair,” he responded, and luckily that was the end of that particular facet of conversation. He expected Venom to claim that they’d never get arrested because he’d just eat the police officers, but he kept his razor-toothed mouth shut. He was intent on the corndogs baking in the oven anyway. Sighing as quietly as possible, Eddie went back to his dinner prep, casually organizing the kitchen as he waited, and Anne returned to her papers. It wasn’t until Eddie was sitting down at the kitchen table to tiredly dig into his greasy frozen dinner that Anne looked over at them again, across the back of the couch.   
  
“Did I hear you call him ‘Vee’ earlier?”   
  
“Uh, ‘Venom’,” Eddie told her. She raised a skeptical eyebrow at him, a favored expression lately, and he laughed. “Don’t ask me. He named himself.”   
  
“A penchant for drama, huh?” Anne laughed, shaking her head fondly. “Well, _Venom--”_   
  
The symbiote looked up at Anne, caught midway through mutilating a corndog.   
  
Stifling a laugh, she continued. “--You’re not really poisonous, right?”   
  
Swallowing the rest of the corndog (stick and all), he blinked slowly at Anne, a move that was almost certainly for show since Eddie was pretty sure his eyes weren’t strictly real and didn’t need to be moisturized. _“Not to Eddie,”_ he said, as ominously as nearly anything else he’d ever said.   
  
“Fair enough,” she said with a nod, going back to her papers.   
  
As it turned out, Venom was quite fond of both corndogs and chicken nuggets, which didn’t surprise Eddie in the least. He was starting to think the symbiote’s taste was exactly as abysmal as his own-- which was probably really useful in their potential to get along. Though it did make him a bit nervous about Venom’s enthusiasm regarding eating _people._ (Not enough to bring it up with him, though. He was kind of hoping the alien would just get used to the fact that he had to start acting like a civilized human being instead of a rabid zombie, and Eddie wouldn’t have to actually _tell_ him to mind his manners.)   
  
He was still hungry though; Eddie, or Venom, he wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure there was actually a difference. As he scooped some chocolate ice cream (graciously on loan from Anne), he wondered aloud.   
  
“Do you get hungry when you’re not, y’know, in a person?”   
  
Venom seemed to think about it for a few moments. Eddie could sense that he wasn’t sure how to exactly answer that question. _‘We are always hungry,’_ he said eventually, though that wasn’t strictly a ‘yes’. _‘When we are not with a host, we hunger for a host. When we are with a host, we hunger for fuel. Life is hunger.’_  
  
Restraining himself from just eating straight out of the carton (because he knew there would be no stopping), Eddie scooped a… _modest_ bowlful and put the rest back. “So are you telling me you’ve never _not_ been hungry?”   
  
_‘Yes.’_   
  
Eddie frowned. “Sounds miserable.” He’d only ever gone hungry a few times in his life, in those rough months after the _event_ , after Anne left him and he couldn’t hold a job. And even then he’d always managed to find _something_ before his body started to eat away at him. Still, he remembered the discomfort, and worse yet the uncertainty, always being unsure when or where you’d find your next meal. (It wasn’t so different now, but at least at this point he knew Anne wouldn’t let him literally starve. Not while he was living in her house, anyway. Once he was on his own, it would probably be a different story.)   
  
A silence emanated from Venom for a moment, before he responded, sounding rather soft despite the way his tone didn’t ever seem to change much, _‘That is why we search. ...I am less hungry now.’_  
  
“Good to know,” Eddie said, glad to have some good news. Although he still felt bad for the symbiote; if this craving to eat every animal- or cocoa-based food product he saw was ‘less hungry’, the old hunger must have been pretty bad. He guessed he could understand why zombies were always trying to take bites out of anything that moved.   
  
There was a warm feeling surrounding Venom, and it got warmer with the first bite of ice cream, despite its frozen nature. It wasn’t as concentrated of a flavor as the chocolate truffles, but it clearly gave the alien a sense of comfort.   
  
“Found your favorite flavor, huh?” Eddie asked, as Venom’s head appeared beside him, swiping his tongue out to lick the inside of the bowl. (Even though he could taste it just the same through Eddie’s mouth, there was apparently something more viscerally pleasing about going through the process of eating it, which Eddie understood well enough.) “If you could only have one for the rest of your life, and you had to choose between chocolate and human flesh, which one would you choose?” he asked teasingly.   
  
Venom made a noise of displeasure. _‘Don’t make me choose,’_ he said, and Eddie just laughed, enjoying the predictability.   
  
The rest of the evening was spent on mostly meaningless things like browsing the internet, though Eddie did take the time to send in a few more digital applications to various chain restaurants and stores. But it was funny; even the things he normally felt were time-wasters didn’t feel nearly as useless as usual. Youtube was typically one of those things he might idly watch for several hours in the absence of anything better to do, not necessarily enjoying himself but just… doing it because that was what he did. Now though, even the most mundane action had some amount of novelty to it, because everything was new to Venom.   
  
Because of the way the symbiote could read his mind, there was nothing really hidden from Venom, and that included all of Eddie’s miscellaneous experiences like washing dishes or folding laundry or cooking or driving or anything, really. If he had to go to school and write an essay about the American Revolution, that was something Venom could probably do, with the ability to dive back deep through Eddie’s memories and pull out whatever information he needed. But it was still an entirely different thing to experience something real-time, because Venom’s apparent mind reading ability couldn’t quite capture the nuance of what it felt like to hear a good song for the first time, or why a joke was so damn funny.   
  
It had been… years, since Eddie had liked just watching TV in his spare time, but that evening they casually flipped through channels for over an hour, and everything seemed so much more interesting than it had before, Venom’s commentary slowly picking up as he realized that Eddie didn’t mind his chatter. It kind of reminded Eddie of being young, hanging out with his friends back in high school or college, sitting around and laughing at the dumb stuff on cable, how ridiculous commercials were. It wasn’t something he often thought about, not consciously, but… he missed that.   
  
_‘Don’t have many friends?’_ Venom asked, during a dull commercial that wasn’t worth making fun of.   
  
That question (and the tactless phrasing) would have been rude coming from anyone else, but it had been clear to Eddie from the beginning that Venom never meant badly by the things he asked. Sighing in slight melancholy, pushing back the nostalgia that had been creeping up, Eddie said, “Not really, these days. I dunno if it was because of the zombies or if that’s just how adulthood is, but everyone I knew kind of went their separate ways after college. I don’t really keep in touch with friends anyway. Except Anne, obviously.”   
  
_‘The people from earlier,’_ Venom offered, a suggestion to potentially counter Eddie’s statement.   
  
But Eddie just shook his head, smiling maybe a bit sadly. “Nah, I don’t really think Mr. Choi and them count as friends. They’re like… business acquaintances. Y’know we probably wouldn’t just… hang out or something.”   
  
The fact that he was damn near friendless was nothing new to him, so it didn’t really sting as much as it might if he’d been deluding himself that he had any really meaningful relationships. It stung maybe even a little less when Venom said, after a quiet moment, _‘We don’t have friends either.’_   
  
It wasn’t something Eddie had spent much time thinking about. After the first encounter, he had pushed most existential questions about parasites out of his mind. Thinking of them as living beings, let alone kind of a type of _people,_ that was the last thing he wanted. “Do you guys even have relationships the same way humans do?” he asked, realizing maybe for the first time since the comet had crashed that he didn’t really know anything about the aliens. Nobody did.   
  
_‘It is different,’_ Venom told him, but that was all he said, and Eddie couldn’t glean much more detail from their connection. He supposed it didn’t really matter that much anymore anyway, did it?   
  
The conversation shifted his mood somewhat to something more pensive, less inclined to sit around and while the night away. “How ‘bout a walk?” he asked rhetorically, pushing up from the couch and going over to retrieve his jacket. It wasn’t too late in the year yet for the nights to be uncomfortably cold if you weren’t riding, so he left his gloves and unclipped just his house key to take with him. As his hand was on the door, it turned from the other side and Dan came in, halting so he didn’t run straight into Eddie.   
  
“Heading out?” he asked, as cheerful as anyone coming off a long hospital shift could be.   
  
“Oh, yeah, just thought I might get some air,” Eddie said, changing places with Dan as the man moved into the apartment and set his things down on the table nearby.   
  
“Huh,” Dan said by way of acknowledgement. He paused for just a short second before he asked, “Mind if I tag along?”   
  
Eddie didn’t want to lie and say he had some sort of plan or anything, especially knowing that Venom could out him at any moment, and Dan _was_ a good friend of his. Still, the situation raised alarms in Eddie’s head. That was definitely Dan’s friendly way of saying he had something important to talk about, and at this point? There was very little chance that what he wanted to talk about was going to be something Eddie wanted to hear. Taking a deep breath, he steeled himself for whatever the conversation was going to be, and said to him, “Sure.”   
  
Grinning, Dan switched out his work jacket for a more suitable coat, put his keys back in his pocket and nodded for Eddie to lead the way, closing the door behind them. Eddie hadn’t been sure where he was planning to go; he thought he might ask Venom if there was anything nearby he wanted to see, maybe even just go for a jog to get out some of the excess energy he’d had lately. Now he really wasn’t sure, so he just set off down the sidewalk, hands jammed in his pockets.   
  
_‘Worried?’_ Venom asked, and Eddie ignored him because he didn’t want to look like a loon, talking to himself. Even if Dan knew what he was doing, he didn’t need to give the doctor any extra reasons for thinking of Eddie any differently than he always had.   
  
Dan didn’t seem to be feeling any of the tension Eddie was. He strolled along beside him, keeping up with Eddie’s somewhat fast-paced stride even though he seemed more in the mood for a leisurely walk.   
  
“How are you feeling?” he asked, using his ‘doctor voice’, but still sounding just as genuine as ever.   
  
“Pretty good,” Eddie replied without thinking about it too much. It was true enough.   
  
“That’s good.” Dan nodded, giving him a gentle smile. “So you’re really feeling better?”   
  
Eddie shrugged. “Than last night? Yeah, I guess so. Things’ve settled down a little. Haven’t, uh, destroyed anything today.”   
  
Laughing at Eddie’s self-deprecating sort of joke, Dan shook his head. “Well good, but I meant compared to before. You know. You said he was healing you. Does that seem to be… true?”   
  
Did it? Again, it was hard to say exactly, because he’d never been completely aware of how much damage had been done to his organs-- except of course when they caused him trouble, which wasn’t something he could predict. And those broken synapses, the chemical imbalances-- they’d manifested in emotional disorders that were next to impossible to really quantify and might as well have just been part of his personality. Maybe they’d _always_ been there, in fact. He had no way of knowing. Thus, he had no real way of knowing if Venom had fixed them.   
  
_‘Your organs are repaired,’_ Venom said, a note of pride in his voice. _‘But your brain is more difficult. ...We need more meat.’_  
  
“Pfft.” Eddie chuckled at the rather transparent request and its flimsy reasoning. “Well I haven’t thought about killing myself, so that’s an improvement.”   
  
He’d meant the comment in response to Venom’s statement, not Dan’s question, but Dan’s eyebrows rose up and he hummed. “Good to hear,” he said lightly, and Eddie blushed slightly. He hadn’t meant to be that open to Dan. He was pretty sure the guy knew… most of what his various issues entailed. He was a doctor, after all. But as friends it wasn’t something they’d really talked about in that much detail, or that much depth. He’d always been pretty reserved when it came to admitting his occasional suicidal ideations.   
  
Eddie cleared his throat, trying to think of a way to bring the conversation back around in a way that wouldn’t make him seem quite so pathetic-- if that was possible. “I, um, I can do things now, too. Jumping, climbing. That sort of thing. It’s… pretty cool.” He gave Dan a look from the corner of his eye that he hoped was very nonchalant.   
  
Venom grinned internally. _‘It_ is _cool. We should do it more often.’_  
  
“Really?” Dan asked, sounding genuinely interested. “So you have new abilities? Aside from the--” He wiggled his fingers, which Eddie took to mean the little tentacle hands Venom sometimes spawned. “That’s really fascinating, Ed. And you’re _sure_ he’s not hurting you?”   
  
There was no way to be entirely sure, since Eddie wasn’t as omnipotent in regards to Venom as the symbiote was in regards to him (he was learning to read the alien’s deeper thoughts but it didn’t come naturally to him like it would to a creature born to it), so he could really only take Venom’s word for it, combined with his own observations. What he said to Dan though was, “Pretty sure,” because he _was pretty sure,_ and didn’t want to worry Dan with the possibility that the symbiote was lying to him-- or even just wrong. After all, this was his first time too, with a proper host, if Eddie took his word for it, which he did.   
  
_‘We are not hurting you. We would not do that. You should trust us.’_  
  
“That’s a real relief,” Dan said, and it was written all over his face. Eddie couldn’t blame him for being worried about Venom being malicious. Parasites were scary. He knew that. Of course Dan would be worried, having one in such close proximity. But Dan surprised him, as he often did. “After everything you’ve been through before, Anne and I were really worried for you. She just paced the whole time you were gone last night, and I know it wasn’t just Mr. B she was worried for. She kept giving me that look. You know, the one where she’s wondering how much she’s willing to sacrifice to fix things. I told her I thought everything was going to be fine.”   
  
Venom stirred in Eddie’s chest, giving him that fluttery heart feeling he always associated with the damage before. _‘He believed us?’_   
  
“You believed us?” Eddie asked in Venom’s place, and for himself as well.   
  
Dan shrugged. “The evidence pointed in that direction. Your story filled in blanks on questions I didn’t even know I was asking. It was obvious there was more to it than the story we all know about parasites. Of course that’s what Anne brought up-- What about those other people I’d seen at the hospital? The ones that were like you. What if you ended up that way? I just said--” He took a breath and looked into the middle distance. “--those other people didn’t have a doctor and a top-tier lawyer backing them up.” Turning his attention back to Eddie, he grinned, and Eddie could feel the tumultuous emotions welling up in him dangerously close to his sinuses.   
  
He cleared his throat and looked away, though he was unable to keep the smile off his face. The sincere part of him wanted to hug Dan and thank him for having his back, maybe cry on his shoulder a little, but the vast majority of him, the parts that realized they were in public and it was far too dangerous (emotionally) to put himself out there like that, would never allow such a thing. Instead he just said, “Yeah, that’s probably true.” And then because sincerity was stronger than skepticism in moments like this, he found himself saying, “I’m really lucky to have you guys in my corner.”   
  
That was exactly the kind of response Dan liked to hear; the man was nothing if not sincere. He clapped Eddie on the shoulder-- and then pulled back in surprise when he found his palm sticky with dark goo that had seeped up out of Eddie, as if to create a barrier between him and whoever was so bold as to lay their hands on him.   
  
“Hey, cut that out,” Eddie said, frowning at his shoulder as the symbiote’s liquid flesh faded away.   
  
_‘Instinct,’_ Venom said as an excuse, and Eddie just hummed in response. He wasn’t that annoyed; he just didn’t want to gross Dan out after such a… nice moment.   
  
“It’s fine,” Dan said, looking down at his hand. All traces of the goo had stayed behind on Eddie though, probably further proving the theory that the symbiote had no reason to move hosts, even when it would have been dead easy. Laughing pleasantly, Dan added, “He probably just wants to protect you too. You’re his home, after all.”   
  
Of course Eddie had thought about it that way, but hearing someone else say it was different. ‘Home’... That was already such a strange concept these days, when things were in such low-key turmoil. Eddie hadn’t really felt like he’d had a home for… ages. (And actually, he didn’t think that had anything to do with the zombies.) To think that _he_ was someone else’s home? They said ‘home is where the heart is’, so… maybe. Maybe that was true.   
  
_‘It_ is _true, Eddie,’_ Venom told him. _‘This man knows what he’s talking about.’_   
  
Eddie smirked. “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he said, though in response to who, even he wasn’t entirely sure.   
  
Dan seemed pleased to hear Eddie agreeing with him. He sighed, an optimistic bent to the sound. “See? I think things really will be fine. You’ve got the three of us looking out for you. If we just keep our heads up, I’m sure everything will turn out. It doesn’t have to be any more scary than any other medical condition; it just requires some managing and a proper support system.”   
  
Shaking his head fondly, because damn was Doctor Dan good at his job (he bet kids loved him), Eddie laughed. “Well, you’re the doc,” he said.   
  
They continued their aimless walk down the street, though the nervous energy had calmed down enough for Eddie to stop power-walking. Although they’d come to a pretty satisfactory conclusion about the situation, Dan still had a lot of questions-- mostly for his own curiosity, it seemed. He was a little bit like an excitable kid as he asked if Eddie had figured out how to use the ‘ropes’. (Tactful of him not to say ‘tentacles’, Eddie thought.)   
  
“Uh, not really,” Eddie was saying (because, sure, he’d used them to apprehend the thief earlier, but that wasn’t really something he’d figured out so much as it was something he’d done on instinct, guided by Venom) when the alien decided to be sneaky and poke a tiny version of his head out from Eddie’s collar just so he could verbally contradict his host.   
  
_“Yes we have,”_ he said, his deep voice very small, as it was coming from something the size of a garter snake, but still surprising to Dan (and Eddie).   
  
“Have you?” Dan prompted, only glancing at the little snake-like protrusion of symbiote, otherwise keeping his eyes on Eddie’s face or the sidewalk in front of him. If anyone happened to see Venom (who was hunkered down close to Eddie’s neck, mostly hiding in his jacket collar) they’d just think he was a pet, but that would still cause them far more trouble than they needed now, or ever again.   
  
Eddie sighed. “What a little traitor,” he said, scowling down at Venom, whose tiny mouth seemed to be grinning.   
  
Venom ignored him, and answered Dan, who had drifted in a little closer to Eddie’s shoulder so he could hear better. _“We beat a thief today,”_ he proudly told the man. _“Took back what he stole, returned it to the owner.”_  
  
Making an impressed noise, Dan said in a voice very suited for speaking to children, “Good job. That must have been something to see.”   
  
_“Nobody saw,”_ Venom said, and Eddie just rolled his eyes.   
  
“I sure as hell _hope_ nobody saw. Last thing I need is to be labelled some sort of vigilante.”   
  
He almost regretted saying that because as soon as he did he could feel Venom rifling through his memories for the meaning of the word, and then absolutely glowing with thinly veiled excitement at the idea.   
  
Luckily Dan seemed to be on his side. “Eddie’s right,” he said, as if he knew that Venom was looking to cause trouble. “It would be best for you to keep a low profile. You know what could happen if you get caught.”   
  
A painful emotion surged through Eddie as Venom remembered Dan’s story from the night before, the horror story of symbiotes being forcibly separated from their hosts and killed. Still he wasn’t completely willing to admit any wrongdoing. _“We never do anything that Eddie doesn’t want to do.”_   
  
Technically that had been true so far, so Eddie avoided Dan’s gaze in order not to have to deny that. Fine, so he had wanted to beat that thief down. That wasn’t so unreasonable. And as much as he had protested at first, Venom had convinced him to do all those rooftop acrobatics on their way to catch Mr. Belvedere, and he’d ended up actually liking it.   
  
“Uh huh,” Dan said, understanding perfectly well what Eddie was avoiding admitting. “Well that’s good. Cooperation is important in a partnership.”   
  
Venom practically preened at that. He withdrew back into Eddie and said privately, _‘Dan is a good human.’_  
  
“Oh yeah? Want him to be your host then?” Eddie asked, flat but still teasing. Mostly teasing.   
  
_‘No,’_ Venom said, _‘You are the ideal host for me.’_   
  
Eddie didn’t know why he liked hearing that so much, when this whole situation was still just so… un-ideal, wasn’t it? But he did like hearing it-- or maybe it was just Venom who liked saying it, and Eddie was just feeling that.   
  
It took him a moment to realize Dan was raising an eyebrow at him and he laughed bashfully. “Oh, uh, Venom likes you,” he explained.   
  
“Venom?” Dan’s curious eyebrow crept up further. “Is that his name?”   
  
He felt Venom’s adamant annoyance over Eddie’s embarrassment, but he couldn’t explain why he dreaded (in a comical sort of way) having to explain to someone new that, yes, that was the symbiote’s name, and _no,_ he hadn’t named it himself (at least not consciously). “That’s what he says,” Eddie told him with a shrug and a bashful grinning sort of grimace.   
  
“Well it’s…” Dan turned away, back towards the path, casting about for some response and eventually coming up with, “very fierce.” Again Venom preened, missing out on the kindly patronizing aspect of the comment. Eddie figured it was better this way anyway; let the symbiote think his name made him sound big and scary if that was what made him happy.   
  
From the look on his face, Dan’s curiosity was not quite sated, but there wasn’t much more they could talk about the subject in public, and he knew that, so he let Eddie change the topic. “So, you did it, huh?” he said. “Proposed. I saw Anne’s ring last night. It, um, looks good on her.”   
  
If there was anything to brighten Dan’s mood (not that it needed brightening; he seemed content enough already, as was his wont when he wasn’t worrying over something), it was talking about Anne and their relationship. Sighing happily, he confirmed that he had proposed, and she’d obviously said yes, and they’d had a wonderful dinner where they really didn’t plan anything because they were too busy being giddy school-children at each other. (He hadn’t said it like that, but Eddie knew.)   
  
He didn’t want to bring it back around to his own stupid problems, but he did feel the need to apologize for how yesterday had gone. “Sorry you had to come home to a mess,” he said. “I didn’t mean to ruin your big day.”   
  
Dan waved it off. “It’s fine. Nothing was ruined, so don’t worry about it. We’re still planning to get married. I don’t think your situation could change that.”   
  
Eddie wasn’t _that_ convinced that he couldn’t find some way to mess things up for them, but he smiled and nodded anyway, and prompted Dan to continue gushing about dinner and the way Anne’s eyes sparkled and what kind of venue they might hold the ceremony at and when.   
  
_‘You’re still worried,’_ Venom said quietly in his mind as they walked. _‘Still think they’re going to get rid of you. I will never get rid of you.’_  
  
It was a complicated emotion that that statement gave Eddie, but he didn’t have the time to think about it right then so he ignored it and continued walking, listening to his friend’s happy rambling.   
  
They strolled a mile or two out, down towards the bay and its hit or miss congregation of houses and businesses. Beachfront property was always popular, but the water added an aspect of unpredictability. On one hand, people thought it was likely safer than living near the suburbs and forest, where you could (in theory) be jumped by an infected _squirrel_ or something, but on the other hand there was no proof that parasites couldn’t inhabit fish or, god forbid, _seagulls,_ so there was just as much hesitation, leaving the seaside area a patchwork mess of homeless despots and those businessmen still desperately clinging to what they knew of real estate values _before,_ and somehow keeping the area more alive than the other 3/4s of the city’s outskirts. Even so, Eddie hadn’t ventured there much before, being one of the people who was paranoid about being attacked by an infected pelican or something. He’d never spent a lot of time by the water before the zombies came about, so he couldn’t say the area was specifically any more or less than it had been back then, but there was something sort of calming about it now, now that he had less reason to worry. The way the waves crashed against the rocks and the sea wall, it was a little like the way the roar of his bike’s engine drowned out everything else.   
  
“We haven’t decided on a season yet,” Dan continued, surveying the area calmly. “I wonder if there are any nice beach venues if we go with a warm month. What do you think? Or would something uptown be better? Indoors, maybe?”   
  
If they wanted to invite a lot of the rich fancy people they worked with, Eddie thought uptown and indoors were better bets no matter the season, because those sorts of people liked to forget that there was even a life outside the city. The idea of a smaller ceremony was appealing though, with only those in attendance who liked them enough to brave a less secure venue.   
  
_‘Not your party,’_ Venom said, a little curiously, like he wondered why Eddie would get so invested in the details or think it mattered what he thought.   
  
Eddie wasn’t sure if he was about to give the symbiote some sort of clever retort or just ignore him entirely and respond to Dan’s question, because they were distracted by a distant scream that grated on Venom’s nerves and made him turn them towards the sound.   
  
“What was that?” he asked, and Dan just looked at him with his eyebrows drawn down, having clearly heard nothing.   
  
_‘They’re in pain,’_ Venom said, shaking with agitation. They wanted to both run to help, and run away, the scream apparently communicating to Venom exactly the level of threat.   
  
“They?” Words were only so useful, but luckily Eddie was starting to be able to understand the nuance behind what Venom said, and he could tell that in this case he didn’t mean just some gender-neutral person, but multiple people. “You mean another pair?” He gritted his teeth as he stared off in that direction, straining his ears and Venom’s senses for the noise to come again.   
  
Venom shivered, still unsure if it was better to stay far away or join in the fight-- whatever fight there might be. Eddie was worried it was less of a fight and more of an attack. _‘Yes, one who found their host. They are being attacked by humans.’_  
  
“Is there something going on?” Dan asked, as Eddie began to stagger haltingly towards the sound the doctor couldn’t hear from that distance.   
  
Though he very much felt Venom’s indecision, his desperation to stay safe and keep what he’d finally found, some part of Eddie (or maybe it was another part of Venom) itched to save whoever it was that had let loose such a bloodcurdling screech of pain. “Someone needs help,” he told Dan, looking quickly back over his shoulder, his expression unfortunately worried and scared. “I’ll meet you back home.” 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had a busy week. 'Pologies for the slightly late chapter.

And then they were dashing down the streets, he and Venom, carried by some sort of instinct to help their people. The symbiote was still nervous, probably from the details he hadn’t been able to properly relay to Eddie in that short moment, but he didn’t protest, and guided by his host he spurred them forward through the back alleys they dove into, up and over the rough brick walls of half-abandoned buildings to the rooftops where they’d come to feel more at home. It wasn’t long before Eddie didn’t have to strain his ears to hear the scuffle, and Venom could sense more detail.   
  
_‘They have grenades,’_ he told Eddie. That was what had caused the initial scream, the discomfort and terror of the pair being shook apart by the sonic bomb. But there were still the sounds of a fight, yelling from multiple sources, and anguish in a dark echoing voice that only Venom could really understand. The fact that the assailants were still in pursuit of the host and their symbiote, and still lobbing grenades, was what made Venom hesitate, but still they drew closer and in the end when they finally saw the pair, there was nothing they could do to stop themselves.   
  
It was a girl, a dark-haired young woman, crying as she fended off firecrackers and small grenades from seven or eight masked men in hoodies, who crowded her towards the end of a pier. Multiple black tendrils sprouted from her body to swat the projectiles away and claw at the men as they got closer, but the attackers used flamethrowers to singe the symbiote’s arms every time it tried to grab at them, making it flinch back in pain. Eddie was glad to see the symbiote had managed to stay with her, but it was clear that it was not in top working order, or that it was out of its depth in a fight.   
  
Honestly, Eddie should have been out of his depth too; he should have known that eight armed men would be too much for him to take on, but between his and Venom’s sudden rage at seeing the uneven fight, he couldn’t find it in him ( _or_ in Venom) to care.   
  
“Cover my face,” he ordered his symbiote as he leapt down off the three story building to the road below, empty of anyone not involved in the fight. It seemed at the first sign of sonic grenades, people had decided to evacuate the area, which was a good choice all around.   
  
_‘We’ll do better than that,’_ Venom said with a vicious grin, growing up out of Eddie’s body to cover him entirely in a smooth suit of symbiote flesh. Under normal circumstances he might have found it strange, maybe even a little creepy, but for now he was grateful for the protection and the anonymity, because he wasn’t going to hold back against these men.   
  
The attackers weren’t paying attention to what was going on behind them; clearly they didn’t expect the girl to have any backup, or for any civilians to protest this treatment on an obvious parasite. It made it all too easy to stalk forward and rip two of the flamethrowers from the men’s hands and smash them to pieces on the ground, the fuel splattering all over the seaspray-damp concrete of the boulevard. The rest happened rather quickly, each of the men turning to him in surprise, then fear, then rage, refocusing their attacks on him. It was almost a blur as Venom wrapped thin ropes around whichever limbs were in reach and ripped the men towards each other until their heads cracked, heedless of the bullets of the guns they drew against him. Before they could shower him with flame, he pulled the flamethrowers out of their hands and tossed them over the pier and out into the ocean. Half of the men were on the ground with probably concussions by the time one of the remaining attackers finally dropped a sonic grenade on them. The pain was intense, like a headache turned up to a thousand and ten percent and flooding through their whole body, but they withstood it, Venom unleashing a violent scream at the man who loosed it and grabbing him by the shoulder.   
  
There was a moment where Eddie could feel that Venom was about to make a meal of the man, and oddly he found that he wasn’t as viscerally upset by the prospect of it as he ought to have been, but before the symbiote could sink his needle-pointed teeth into the grunting man, he stopped, growled at the man in frustration, and then used him as a shield to bash his teammate against a lightpost. The last two men went down easily enough, one with a slash across the chest from Venom’s deathly sharp claws, the other thrown to the ground with an arm wrapped in a tentacle and broken in several places. Satisfied that they were safe for the moment, they turned to the pier and the young woman who was cowering there, fiercely caught between fight and flight.   
  
_“Are you okay?”_ they asked in Venom’s deep growling voice. Inside, Eddie thought maybe they ought to have switched back to speak with her, but the worst was done already.   
  
“Please,” the girl said, lightly accented, and this close up they could see that she was more of a teenager than a woman. She shook her head, crouching down but still with her symbiote’s black arms raised in defense, not submissive. “Please don’t hurt us.”   
  
‘Us…’ Eddie thought, tuned in on that specific word. ‘Sounds like she knows.’   
  
_“We will not hurt you,”_ Venom told her, putting out a hand for her to grab hold of.   
  
Still she shrunk away from it, struggling to her feet with the help of the shaky tentacles sprouting from her back. She wrapped her arms around herself as she stood, and the black ropes came to drape gently around her too. “Are you… one of them?” she asked cautiously.   
  
‘One of who?’ Eddie wondered. The bad guys? The symbiotes? He didn’t know, and Venom didn’t either, so instead of answering with words Venom’s dark form melted back into Eddie, leaving him a mostly unassuming human, which he hoped answered her question. He did at least ask, in his hopefully less frightening human voice, “You’re not too hurt, are you?”   
  
She still looked a bit scared but it seemed she understood better now. “I’m… okay,” she said. Quickly, a far-off look came over her face and she changed it to, “ _We’re_ okay. ...You… you have one too? But you’re not… not a zombie?”   
  
“Not as far as I know,” Eddie said with a shrug. “And I don’t think you are either, so, um, maybe you should get out of here. Can I walk you home or something?”   
  
The girl seemed hesitant, but her decision was made for her as the both of them heard the distant wailing of police sirens, and with them the high-powered portable disruptors grafted into the cars. She nodded and headed back off the pier, stepping quickly around the bodies lying unconscious on the street. Glancing over her shoulder, she led the way into some back alleys, Eddie quick on her heels. When she felt they were far enough away from the danger, she stopped in the shadow of an old restaurant’s overhang and turned to Eddie.   
  
“Thank you,” she said, arms hugged around her body defensively, but with an open expression on her face. Her symbiote’s tentacles had faded away-- or so he thought, until he realized she was wearing a new scarf; sleek and black like fancy silk, if you didn’t look too hard. “I really thought those men were going to kill us until you showed up.”   
  
“Hunters usually won’t kill a host if they can get the parasite out, but, y’know, I understand the fear.”   
  
Laughing uneasily, the girl shook her head. “Those weren’t hunters. They were my uncle’s enemies. And I don’t think it was Dúshé they wanted to kill; it was me.”   
  
The unfamiliar Chinese word threw Eddie for a loop, but it only derailed him for a short second. “Woah, wait. You’re saying those guys were trying to kill _you,_ not just your symbiote?”   
  
“Symbiote?” Eddie gestured with his head and the girl glanced down at her scarf before looking back up at Eddie. “Yeah, they don’t care about parasites at all. They only care that she was protecting me.” Sadly, she brought her hands up and folded them in the fake fabric of her scarf. “I’m sorry you got hurt, Dúshé.”   
  
There was a quiet moment then and Eddie could only imagine that the girl was speaking privately with her symbiote, which was honestly fairly awkward and he suddenly felt sorry for anyone who’d had to put up with him doing the same the past day. After a moment, he cleared his throat and asked, “So, um, if there were men after you, maybe we should get you home?”   
  
Humming through a grimace, the girl refused to meet his eye. “I… I wasn’t going to go home.”   
  
_‘A runaway,’_ Venom said, and Eddie sighed because that was the last thing they needed. Well, maybe not the _last_ thing, but it was low on the list.   
  
“Okay, but listen,” Eddie said to the girl, steepling his hands in front of him. “How ‘bout you do… anyway? Because you’re obviously in trouble and I think your family probably deserves to know.”   
  
It was pretty clear to Eddie that as much as the girl might have been adamant about running before, this attack had shaken her pretty badly and she was now rethinking her plans. She nodded, then looked down at her scarf again. “Dúshé?” she asked, and listened for a moment before nodding again in response and leveling Eddie with a steely look of decisiveness. “Alright. I’ll go home if you come with me.”   
  
Since that was Eddie’s original plan, he readily accepted and gestured for her to lead the way. The girl seemed happy enough to walk in silence, maybe caught up in her own worries about her family, or still getting over the attack on her life, or maybe even just talking with her symbiote, but Eddie had too many questions not to ask. He didn’t normally like to pry, but this was extenuating circumstances.   
  
“So, um, if it wasn’t because of your symbiote, why were those guys trying to kill you? You said they were your uncle’s _enemies?_ What, is he some sort of hotshot?”   
  
The girl looked over her shoulder, and her expression was calculating. “You can meet him when we get home.”   
  
Venom stirred in Eddie’s chest, laughing slightly. _‘This girl is dangerous,’_ he said, and Eddie couldn’t pretend that was his _first_ inkling that there was more to her than meets the eye. After all, what kind of person had _enemies?_ _‘The dangerous kind,’_ Venom answered, with pictures that included his people, and now the monster they created when they merged. In Venom’s memory, both the thief from earlier and the gang of attackers were staring at him with hateful red eyes. Yes, there were now a good handful of people who knew that they were dangerous.   
  
Eddie sighed. This morning he’d just been some strange parasite-infected nobody who was starving for a minimum-wage job. How did he suddenly have _enemies?_ The one uniting factor was Venom-- who grinned like a cat to be implicated as the reason why Eddie’s life was complicated now.   
  
_‘You like it. And so do we.’_  
  
That was an argument for another hour, should Eddie choose to accept it. For now, he still had questions for his young charge. “How did you--” he began, before realizing he didn’t quite know what he was going to ask. “Your, um, symbiote. You said its name was… Doosha? That mean something?”   
  
“A type of snake,” the girl said, smiling sweetly-- and not faux-sweet either. She seemed genuinely pleased to be able to openly answer Eddie’s question. “Yours? Does it have a name?”   
  
Before Eddie could reply, his symbiote bubbled up out of him. _“We are Venom,”_ he said, with a feeling that Eddie almost wanted to describe as gleeful. Idiot alien seemed to really enjoy exposing himself to people.   
  
The girl’s eyes went wide, but with something much nicer than fear. She tapped on her scarf and asked, “Dúshé, can you do that?” to which her symbiote responded by changing its scarf-like shape into a picture-perfect replica of a snake coiled around her neck, raising its head to flick its tongue first at its host and then at Venom.   
  
_“We are Dúshé,”_ it said, in a voice not unlike the girl’s, but pitched much deeper and darker, the same gravelly growl as Venom’s but distinctly feminine. (Eddie wondered if that meant the symbiote was female, or if that was just a reflection of its host, and Venom answered his question with a memory of his previous host and the way his patchwork thoughts had been in her voice then.) _“I failed to protect Fang. Thank you for your help.”_ She nuzzled into Fang’s neck before melting back into her scarf-like shape.   
  
“Have you known each other long?” Eddie asked, and Fang shook her head.   
  
“A while, but not long enough to learn to fight like that.” She nodded towards Eddie, eyes flicking up at Venom’s little floating face. “Maybe I should have listened to my family.”   
  
That was a line of questions just waiting to be asked, but she hadn’t answered him clearly the first time so he didn’t even bother asking again. She was leading him home apparently, ( _‘We can take them, don’t worry,’_ Venom thought in response to Eddie’s imagination telling him that it could be a trap) so he’d find out soon enough anyway, he figured.   
  
On that note, though, just in case things went totally south, he decided to text Dan so he and Anne didn’t worry too much. Not that they’d be worried over him, but just in case. ( _‘They worry. All you humans worry, too much.’_ ) Then he continued after Fang, pushing Venom back into his skin as they wandered into the more populated part of town.   
  
In a neighborhood a few blocks from Little China, Fang took them to the back door of a gated townhouse. “Shouldn’t we use the front door?” Eddie asked. It felt a little strange to be returning someone’s daughter to them through a _back door._ It was weird enough that he was bringing her home to begin with. He wasn’t a police officer or anything. How was he going to explain that he’d helped the attempted runaway escape from a mob of attackers? Did her family know about the symbiote?   
  
Fang just shook her head and gave Eddie a look that very gently implied he was an idiot. Very gently. “Nobody uses the front door.” She knocked on the back door and stood up straight so her face could be viewed through the little window that slid open a few moments later. The eyes behind it widened when they caught sight of her.   
  
“Fang!” The window slid shut and after a short moment the door latch was noisily undone and the door opened, and three Chinese women rushed to usher Fang and Eddie into the house, chattering worriedly at Fang in their native language. She didn’t look very pleased at the way they crowded around her. She let it continue for a few moments, haltingly responding to their questions in the short moments they gave her, before finally she pushed them gently but firmly back and said, “Tell Uncle I brought someone he should meet.”   
  
The women all glanced at Eddie. He shrugged and waved half-heartedly at them as they stared in confusion and one bustled off further into the house. The other two returned to fussing over Fang, who was having an easier time responding to them now that there was one fewer.   
  
Eddie only had to stand around awkwardly for a minute or two before the woman came back, leading a man he could only assume was Fang’s uncle. He strode up to her, took a good look, and sighed.   
  
“You’re not hurt,” he said, and it was more of a comment than a question, but still Fang shook her head, adopting a somewhat more childish manner.   
  
“This man saved me from Quan’s lackeys,” she told him, gesturing to Eddie, who stood a good few feet behind her, quietly observing the warm decor of the basement room they were in and trying not to look too imposing or too nosy.   
  
He didn’t entirely take the bait she seemed to be laying. “That’s why I told you not to run off,” he said, scowling. “And what would you have done if this man had not stumbled upon you? Call the police and hope they don’t kill you and your pet viper?” He took a deep breath and shook his head sadly. “Fang, we need to talk about this. And we will. But for now, please go tell your mother you’re alright.”   
  
Fang looked more humbled than she had yet, but still there was a note of petulance when she nodded and headed back further into the house to presumably do as she was told. She didn’t look over her shoulder as she left, but her scarf fluttered in a way that might have been a wave.   
  
Turning to Eddie, the man nodded deeply to him in what was nearly a short bow. “I am Qiang Kuai-Yong. Thank you for bringing my niece home. She ran away this morning. We were worried she might have gotten into some trouble, with her… unique circumstances.”   
  
“You mean the…” Eddie paused, unsure if the man really knew about Fang’s symbiote in any amount of detail. He motioned vaguely to his neck.   
  
“The parasite, yes,” Kuai-Yong said with a solemn nod. “But also her relation to me. Quan is, let’s say, a business rival of mine, and he’s been trying to get under my skin for some time. I’m not surprised his people were following Fang. I suppose I might even be grateful for it, because otherwise she’d have slipped out from under our noses.”   
  
“Why was she trying to run away to begin with?” Eddie asked.   
  
Kuai-Yong shook his head dismissively. “Who can say. She is a teenager, displeased with her lot in life. Regardless, I thank you for helping her. I’m told you fought Quan’s men? You’ve a parasite of your own?”   
  
_“Symbiote,”_ Venom said with a growl, materializing from Eddie’s neck in his would-be snake-like form. He clearly didn’t fear Fang’s uncle, at least not enough to keep himself hidden. Not that that meant much, since he’d showed next to no restraint in that regard yet.   
  
“He doesn’t like that word,” Eddie said with a shrug.   
  
The man wasn’t as surprised by Venom’s sudden appearance as most people would have been, but he still stiffened up for a short moment before falling to a more purposefully relaxed posture. “I gathered as much,” he replied with a slight sly smile that rang of his niece. “Fang calls hers ‘Viper’, like it is some sort of pet. I was impressed when she first showed it to us, taken with the possibilities of such a creature. But the climate around such a thing is at this moment quite volatile, as I’m sure you know. I could not allow her to go out in public with it, nor use its full capabilities, knowing it would put her at risk. _You,_ however…”   
  
Eddie swallowed, his mouth and throat suddenly quite dry with the way Kuai-Yong was looking at him-- and moreover, the way he was looking at Venom: hungrily. Not a real physical sort of hunger, like the kind that was quietly gnawing at them any given moment over the past few days, but a hunger all the same.   
  
_‘Power hungry,’_ Venom said, rumbling with some emotion that might have been excitement. _‘He wants to use us, Eddie.’_  
  
‘Why don’t you seem upset about that?’   
  
On the outside, Venom bared his teeth in a smile, and the man responded with a smirk-- before changing gears entirely. “We were in the middle of dinner when the two of you arrived. Or should I say the four of you? Why don’t you join us, and then we can discuss how I will thank you for retrieving Fang.”   
  
Eddie knew he was an idiot sometimes, but he liked to think he wasn’t a completely genre-unsavvy dumbass. He knew he should have said no immediately, maybe even just left Fang at the door as soon as someone opened it for her, but the invitation was sounding too good to pass up, for maybe a variety of reasons, only one of which was Venom’s enthusiasm.   
  
_‘Free food, Eddie. Don’t tell him no or I’ll have to start eating your pancreas.’_  
  
He didn’t take the threat seriously, but he was hungry too. If he focused, he could smell the savory scent of beef and roasted vegetables wafting down the stairwell. And… as much as he knew he shouldn’t get involved with someone who had honest-to-god _enemies,_ he had the distinct feeling that this man was about to offer him a job-- and one that was bigger than washing dishes.   
  
“Yeah, sure,” he eventually said, giving a nonchalant shrug. “That’s, uh, really generous of you.”   
  
Kuai-Yong knew Eddie had been caught, and he gave a friendly but dangerous grin as he led the way into the house. “I’m always generous to those who deserve it.”   
  
That was less reassuring than it probably should have been (or maybe just as reassuring as he wanted), but Eddie shrugged it off and followed after him towards the enticing smell, much to Venom’s glee. (He melted back into Eddie as they went up the stairs though. Even though Kuai-Yong knew about his niece’s symbiote, there was no telling if the whole family did. And even if they did, that didn’t mean they’d be comfortable seeing another one, especially since Venom wasn’t especially great at pretending to be anything innocuous.) Nobody so much as batted an eyelash at Eddie when he sat down next to Kuai-Yong at the large table, and he assumed that it was because word had already spread about him being there, but it was just as likely to be because this sort of occurrence was normal in this house. He got a very busy vibe from the place, like there were probably a lot of visitors in and out.   
  
Everyone else was already eating, chatting to one another mostly in Chinese. Eddie waited for his host to continue the meal he’d clearly been interrupted from before he served himself from the large dishes in the middle of the table: Mongolian beef, and sweet-and-sour pork. (He could practically feel Venom drooling.) As curious as he was to know what the man was going to say to him, he didn’t mind that they simply sat and ate for a good five minutes before Kuai-Yong spoke a word in his direction.   
  
“Please, have as much as you like,” he said, as Eddie slowly finished off the last of his first plate. “Like Fang, you’re eating for two.” (Eddie swore one of the women on the other side of the table snorted at that.)   
  
Eddie gratefully shovelled more food on to his plate. “Thank you, sir,” he said between mouthfuls of the two different dishes. (Eddie prefered the beef, but Venom liked the pork best, perhaps unsurprisingly, given what they said about pork.) “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe how hungry this guy gets.”   
  
“I can imagine,” the man said graciously with a fluid shrug. “To fuel those abilities, it must require quite a lot of food.” He took a bite of his own meal before looking sidelong at Eddie. “It must have taken you some time to learn to manage it.”   
  
“Uhh.” Eddie didn’t want to _lie_ , but he didn’t think the whole truth was a good idea at this point either. ‘Oh, no, I just found him like yesterday’ didn’t seem like the thing to say if you wanted to inspire any sort of confidence in your ability to control a scary alien life form. So he decided to be honest in a different way. “I’m still getting used to it.”   
  
Kuai-Yong nodded as if that were perfectly reasonable. “I’m sure. But from what Fang said, you seem quite capable. Eight men, with flamethrowers and guns. And there was no reason to risk your life, or that of your… partner.”   
  
‘So why did you do it?’ was the unspoken question lingering on the end of his statement. To be perfectly honest, Eddie wasn’t exactly sure why he’d done it. They’d just heard that god-awful scream echoing in their head, a personalized plea for help to anyone who might understand, and… they’d understood. After that, there was no way to ignore her plight, knowing she was one of them.   
  
“She was scared,” Eddie said with an apologetic half-grimace. He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. Maybe the fact that his answer wasn’t something more grand, or maybe for insinuating that Fang had been out of her depth, even though she obviously was.   
  
Smiling in a secretive sort of way, Kuai-Yong said, “Ah, a champion of the innocent then? Do you spend much of your time defending the people, Mister…--?”   
  
“Uh, Eddie!” He scrambled to sit up straighter and face his host, embarrassed that he’d forgotten to introduce himself before chowing down at this family’s dining table. He started to stick his hand out for a shake, but aborted the action halfway through and just bowed his head at Kuai-Yong instead. “Eddie Brock. And, no, I don’t really do this much. I mean, I haven’t. Not that I don’t _want_ to, I just… haven’t.”   
  
Kuai-Yong’s eyes lit up like someone told him an answer he’d already been betting on. “Eddie Brock. I’ve heard of you. Someone spoke your name to me not more than two hours ago. They thought you could help us find Fang. To think, you’ve completed the job before I could hire you to it! _That_ is what I call fate.”   
  
_‘The convenience store lady,’_ Venom offered. Laughing to himself, Eddie wondered if there was actually a lot more to Mrs. Chen than he might have realized. Heck, maybe everyone was more complicated than he gave them credit for, and he’d just always been tangled up in his own dumb problems.   
  
“I’m just glad I could help,” he told Kuai-Yong, bowing his head-- at least until Venom nudged them back to their food.   
  
“And I don’t intend to let your assistance go unrewarded. But perhaps you’d be willing to do some further work for us.”   
  
It wasn’t a question, as much as it _was_ one, but Eddie answered anyway in a non-committal way, giving a slightly nervous “sure” before they went back to their dinners. Kuai-Yong didn’t give any more specifics about what kind of job he was hoping Eddie would do for them, but he did fill the rest of the dinner period with casual questions about Eddie’s life-- and a few that were perhaps not entirely casual, but weren’t out of line, considering the situation. He didn’t mind telling the man about his living situation and his lack of consistent employment and his history as a hunter, because he didn’t get the feeling that he was going to do anything malicious with the information-- and neither did Venom, which made all the difference. Although he’d previously established that Venom’s self-preservation (when it came to his identity) was a bit spotty, Eddie could… if not _hear_ the symbiote’s thoughts, then at least sort of feel them swirling around inside of them, and he could feel that he didn’t think they had anything to fear. Not from this man, anyway. After all, he was just a person, who Venom was entirely capable of eating, if it came down to that. (Though he wasn’t chomping at the bit at the moment, since they were in the middle of a pretty satisfying meal already.)   
  
(He had been a little afraid of the fire before. Maybe a lot afraid. But the more Eddie thought about it, the more he realized that was probably the symbiote reacting to _his_ fear. Only one of them had been burned before, after all. Venom knew that fire was his weakness, but he’d never experienced it close enough to be so viscerally afraid.)   
  
As they were finishing up food and the large dishes were being cleared away, Fang reappeared from one of the several doorways around the open room. She seemed a little surprised to see Eddie there, but pleased, and she grabbed one of the platters out of someone’s hands and brought it over to sit down across from him, grinning-- but not at him so much as at her uncle.   
  
“He’s good, right?” she asked knowingly.   
  
Kuai-Yong spared her a smirk. “Mr. Brock seems like a capable man, but that’s little of your business. You should be grateful for what he’s already given you.”   
  
Just slightly cowed, Fang turned fully to him and bowed her head. “Thank you for helping me earlier, Mr. Brock.” She glanced at her uncle, and he gave her a satisfied nod before fixing Eddie with a serious look.   
  
“I’d like to see a demonstration of your ability, if you’re willing.”   
  
Given how casual their dinner had been (the simmering knowledge that there would be something else later notwithstanding), Eddie was a bit surprised to hear such a request-- and he didn’t know what to say.   
  
_‘Say yes, Eddie,’_ Venom urged him, excited like a dog ready to be released from its cage. _‘We could use the practice.’_  
  
Venom’s enthusiasm aside, he still wasn’t sure. It felt like something of a red flag; though he didn’t feel distrusting of Kuai-Yong, what if the man was looking for his weaknesses so he could exploit them later? What if he wanted to sell him out? He’d already exposed himself to a good degree that evening, but to do it again, entirely voluntarily, just seemed like maybe not the best idea.   
  
“What for?” he asked, cringing a bit at how paranoid he knew he sounded just then, but not willing to stammer and correct his language or tone. Not just now.   
  
He expected Kuai-Yong to dodge the question, maybe glance at Fang out of the corner of his eye and suggest that they talk privately, but he was surprisingly straight with Eddie. “I want to see for myself if you’re as impressive as Fang thinks. And if you are, I’d like to hire you as a bodyguard for my family.”   
  
For a moment, all Eddie could do was stare, probably with his mouth open, until Venom hissed, _‘Eddie, they’re waiting for our answer,’_ and Eddie startled awake and managed to say, “Let me, uh, let me talk to my symbiote about it. I don’t wanna make any sudden decisions without consulting--”   
  
Venom’s grinning face popped up out of his collar. _“Let’s do it. You need the job anyway, Eddie.”_  
  
“Well spoken,” said Kuai-Yong, with a grin. He stood from the table and pushed his chair in, laying a hand on the back of it. “Finish your meal, and when you are done have Fang bring you to the garden. We can discuss the details further after you show us what you can do.”   
  
He left the room then, and Fang gave them a pleased and knowing look over her over-sized dinner plate. “Don’t be nervous,” she said, looking like she didn’t remotely regret letting Eddie bring her back home. “I’m sure you’ll do fine.”   
  
There was very little these days that Eddie could say he was ‘sure’ about, and impressing a probable Chinese crime lord enough that he would hire them for a job he wasn’t positive he wanted, that was definitely not something he was sure he could do. But he’d try-- if for no other reason than because Venom so clearly wanted to. Already the symbiote was stretching out inside of him, limbering up their muscles and the amorphous black goo strung between their tendons and ligaments.   
  
_“We can do this,”_ Venom said to him, fixing him with an excited smile before ducking down and pigging out on what was left on their plate.   
  
Eddie sighed, but he smiled as well, confidence bolstered by his companions here (who maybe only wanted him to do this for their own benefit, but that was nothing new to him, and nothing worth holding grudges over). “Yeah,” he said in nondescript agreement, looking between Venom and Fang. “Thanks. We’ll do our best.”   
  
“You’d better!” said Fang cheerfully, and Eddie didn’t bother asking what the consequence for underperforming would be. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we reach the end of what was written in 2018. Everything after this was written more recently... which means that some of it is _not_ yet written. New posting schedule is 2 chapters per month, which means I've got enough to last to, well, the end of the year.   
> So, the good and bad news: I finished NaNoWriMo with over 50k! Finished early, in fact! But... most of it was miscellaneous other-fandom (and OC) nonsense. I didn't even finish my Yuletide fic, aaaah. So, those are my goals this month. If somehow I don't have enough written to continue a 2-per-month schedule in January, I'll let you know, but otherwise it should hopefully continue this way until the end? I think? ^_^;   
> tl;dr: expect the next chapter mid-month; I'm still working on the rest. Please wish me luck! December has not historically been a great time for writing, holidays and all.   
> Stay warm, friends!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! (It's not a Christmas chapter, I'm just feeling festive.) 
> 
> In this chapter, Eddie wears clothes and pronounces Chinese words! Other things might also happen.

Venom had healed them of the various scrapes and bruises they’d gotten from the sparring match with Kuai-Yong’s men, but even he was a little too tired to do much about the exhaustion. It was a comfortable sort of tiredness, at least, the kind you get after a workout, because that absolutely had been a workout. In what he claimed was probably ‘going easy on them’, Eddie’s prospective employer had set him against three unarmed men, out in the garden courtyard behind the house.   
  
“Unarmed?” Eddie had asked, eying them warily. “That doesn’t seem fair.”   
  
The symbiote had grinned knowingly in Eddie’s mind and pushed them into a fighting stance.   
  
Kuai-Yong had chuckled. “I wouldn’t put my men into any situation they couldn’t handle. You might want to worry about yourself.”   
  
Between Eddie’s decent amount of self-preservation and Venom’s excitement over kicking ass, they ended up coming across as weirdly over-confident-- at least until the first man knocked them to the dirt with an impassive expression.   
  
_‘Hmph,’_ Venom grouched, as Eddie groaned over his temporarily bruised ass. “Not pulling any punches, huh?”   
  
They’d never fought anyone that they hadn’t meant harm to, so there was a spot of confusion over how exactly to handle them, but the two of them managed to get it together after a couple more hard-knocks, and then finally the lot of them were properly in the swing of things. The men were obviously trained in some sort of martial art (or two or three), as well as the apparent sparring etiquette of keeping a straight face. They lightened up as the fight wore on though, as Venom grappled at them with sneaky tentacles and moves that shouldn’t have been possible for anyone whose body had bones in it. By the end, they were clearly all enjoying themselves, even (or especially, being the only ones un-bruised) Kuai-Yong and the various family members who had come out to watch. Their three kung-fu-master opponents still kept mostly straight faces, but Eddie felt like he knew them well enough now to say definitively that they were having fun; sparring, as it turned out, was a great way to get to know people.   
  
The match had ended sort of inconclusively, with nobody knocked out or dead or broken-limbed. In a real fight, it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to consider more than a draw. But after an honest hour of stop-and-go attack and defense, Kuai-Yong had called out, “That will do.” His men stood aside immediately, at attention despite the soreness Eddie _knew_ was plaguing their muscles, while Venom went slack and pulled back into a resting position in Eddie’s body. For his part, Eddie found the nearest pillar to lean against and started wiping the sweat from every surface of his face and neck. He couldn’t recall _ever_ being that soaked from exercise. Even his original parasite experience and the resulting fever hadn’t left him that disgusting, though _this_ was at least considerably less traumatic.   
  
Kuai-Yong had ushered them to a shower after that, and Eddie was so worn out that he didn’t even think about the fact that it was his first instance of being nude around his new body-mate. It wasn’t until later that the thought occurred to him, and even then he was too tired to be more than just the littlest bit embarrassed at the thought. ( _‘Why would you be uncomfortable?’_ Venom asked, clearly barely understanding the concept of modesty. _‘I know you inside-out.’_ Eddie didn’t bother to try to explain it. Maybe another day, when he wasn’t beat to death.)   
  
A servant or someone had been waiting for Eddie when he exited the communal-looking shower in just his towel, and they handed him a bundle of clothing with the apparent intent that he wear them. They didn’t say anything, so he didn’t ask what had happened to his old clothes. He didn’t have that much attachment to the jeans and worn-out t-shirt anyway, and the dress-casual outfit he’d been handed was… fine, he figured. (Not really his style, but at this point was _anything_ really his style? Rooftop parkour? Hand to hand combat? Connections with the probable Chinese mafia? Yeah… not really. But was he still doing them? Yup.)   
  
Back towards the dining room (which he only knew because Venom had an actual sense of direction; Eddie on his own would have gotten lost in the huge house), Kuai-Yong was waiting for him, sitting in a cozy-looking armchair, drinking… tea. (His new-found sense of smell told him it was green.)   
  
“Have you had any previous combat training?” he asked, motioning for Eddie to sit down in the chair across from him (which Eddie did). “Military?”   
  
“Uh, I played a couple sports back in high school?” Eddie said with a shrug.   
  
Kuai-Yong laughed. “Then this ability is innate to the parasite. Hmm.” He looked off to the side for a moment, to consider who-knew-what. Eddie could only guess, and hope that it wasn’t something that would put them in an even more dangerous position. But Kuai-Yong didn’t dwell for long. “I’ve taken the liberty of looking further into your history. It seems after your retirement from hunting you’ve been unemployed for several years. No family to speak of. Would I be wrong to infer that you would be amenable to accepting a job that comes with some risk… if it pays well?”   
  
‘Job’ and ‘pays well’ had almost a pavlovian response in Eddie, and subsequently in Venom, to the point that he almost didn’t even think about ‘risk’. _‘We could buy a lot of meat?’_ Venom asked, as Eddie imagined having more than a couple dollars in his bank account for once. But as he’d eaten recently, he wasn’t quite starved enough to agree instantly. Like an adult, he managed to ask a few pertinent questions first.   
  
“What kinda risk?” he asked. “You said you wanted me to be a… a bodyguard?”   
  
With an amused smile, Kuai-Yong shook his head, though clearly it wasn’t in protest of Eddie’s question, but of something Eddie hadn’t quite asked. “It’s very unlikely that you should have to do again what you did this evening for Fang. Very few times has anyone in my family ever been directly targeted, and it is likely that the defeat of Quan’s men tonight will stem future attacks. It’s more of a… precaution.”   
  
That sounded reasonable enough, Eddie figured, based on movies he’d seen, at least. People with money sometimes did things like that, right? Hiring some scary-looking dudes to stand behind them and dissuade possible hecklers. (Eddie was not a scary-looking dude, in his own humble opinion ( _‘Correct. You are soft looking.’_ ), but he wouldn’t argue that particular point to his prospective employer.) The only thing was, well, even if Kuai-Yong genuinely didn’t think he was at risk of having to fight anyone, he didn’t really want to get involved in the seedy crime-ridden underbelly of society. That was the sort of situation where you could get shanked just for knowing the wrong people.   
  
“Yeah, um, sure,” he said dismissively. “But can I just ask you… one thing?”   
  
Kuai-Yong inclined his head in permission.   
  
“Uh, what exactly does your family do?”   
  
In a turn of events that left Eddie reeling, Kuai-Yong answered simply, “Agriculture.”   
  
As it turned out, Fang’s family really, honestly, _actually_ ran a booming agricultural business. They managed a good number of farming operations in and out of the city, from traditional farms and ranches to indoor hydroponics labs, and the distribution of all the food. Apparently, it was one of the most profitable businesses in the post-apocalypse, and was absolutely cut-throat. The ‘enemy’ Fang had told him about, Quan, really was just a business rival, as Kuai-Yong had said. He was still out for blood, but not for any reason more nefarious than good old-fashioned corporate sabotage.   
  
“Oh,” Eddie said. “Uh. Okay. That’s… cool.”   
  
With that settled, Kuai-Yong called for a car and had them driven home. “I’ll send someone to collect you in the morning, 8 AM. We’ll go over the specifics then. If you decide not to work for me, then you will at least let me treat you to breakfast.”   
  
Obviously, Eddie wasn’t going to complain about that, though he hoped breakfast would be included if he _did_ accept the job too, because he was pretty sure they were going to.   
  
_‘Of course we will,’_ Venom said as they watched the midtown scenery pass by from the back seat of a pretty luxurious car.   
  
‘Oh, so I don’t have any choice in the matter?’ Eddie asked.   
  
_‘You do. But you will choose wisely, because you also like to eat.’_  
  
Eddie laughed. “Can’t argue that.”   
  
The driver of the car glanced at him in the rear-view mirror, but said nothing. Eddie chided himself for the slip-up; he’d have to learn to keep his mouth shut, more than just figuratively.   
  
It did raise the question though, about who all in Kuai-Yong’s extended family knew or _would_ know the truth about him. Who knew the truth about Fang? Obviously someone on Quan’s side did. He hoped she had a better support system than he did. Or… as good of one, anyway, because Anne and Dan were, if nothing else, a hell of a lot more supportive than he could possibly expect them to be.   
  
In fact, the two of them were waiting up for him when he stepped inside, like parents whose kid was out past curfew and couldn’t sleep without knowing they were safe. He’d texted them after dinner at Kuai-Yong’s, something like ‘got a spontaneous job interview, be back later’, but apparently that hadn’t been quite enough to assuage them. Which… made sense, after the way he’d run off on Dan like that. Made sense the guy would be a little spooked.   
  
“Oh god, Eddie, you’re okay!” Anne didn’t quite come up and embrace him (things were still a little too weird with Venom riding shotgun and knowing he could pop out at any moment), but she looked like she wanted to, and it was the thought that counted. “Dan said you _heard something?_ And just ran off without explaining.”   
  
“Sorry,” Eddie said, scratching the back of his head. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was sort of on autopilot.”   
  
_“He_ made you--?” Anne asked, looking concerned but maybe a little bit skeptical about her own accusation.   
  
Eddie held up a hand in denial. “No, no. It was a joint decision. It was just… We didn’t totally know what to expect. It was a girl, with, y’know.” He nodded sort of towards himself, as much as that was possible. “A symbiote. Had to save her from some thugs. Then we walked her home and, uh, her uncle offered us a job.”   
  
“‘Us’,” Anne quoted. “So, the two of you. So somebody knows about you.”   
  
Cringing, Eddie shuffled in place a little. He really did feel like a teenager who’d been caught sneaking back in. “Yeah, but I mean, what was I supposed to do? Not save the girl? The guy, uh, Kuai-Yong, wants me to be a bodyguard for his family or something.”   
  
Dan, who as usual had let Anne handle most of the interrogating, smiled acquiescently. “Is that why you’re dressed like that?”   
  
“Ah, yup,” Eddie responded, hands in his pants pockets.   
  
“Kuai-Yong…” Anne frowned in thought. “Qiang Kuai-Yong? You don’t mean the owner of Jiànkāng, right? The agriculture giant?”   
  
Eddie shrugged. “Probably.”   
  
Anne shook her head, uneasy. “Jiànkāng has had more lawsuits brought against it in the past year than I can count. Its main competitors are throwing every accusation they can against it. And you’re telling me the owner’s niece has a symbiote?” She sighed, rubbing her hand over her brow. “Eddie, just be careful. I know I can’t stop you from taking the job, but don’t do it because you don’t think you have any choice, okay? We aren’t going to let you starve, so don’t feel pressured into doing something dangerous.”   
  
Unfortunately for Anne, it was a little late for that. Eddie had been pressured into doing dangerous things periodically for quite some time now. It started with the meteor crash and only took a bit of a vacation until Venom had come around. Now he was back to it because, well, maybe that was just how things were for him. He had to admit he felt better, though whether that was coincidence or because he was _meant_ to be a risk-taker, there was no way of knowing. Regardless, money wasn’t the _only_ reason he was pretty sure he was going to take this job. Venom wanted them to be doing something active, and honestly, Eddie did too. The thought that he could maybe help somebody (even if it was mostly only the family of a man who was too filthy rich to need much help) was far more appealing than sitting at home, waiting for a restaurant to call him back to pick up the odd shift.   
  
“We’ll be careful,” Eddie said, which didn’t really address Anne’s worries as well as a direct answer would have. But he could not, or _would not,_ tell her the full truth, or more than imply that he was a little bit excited to do something that could be considered dangerous.   
  
‘Look,’ he thought at Venom, carefully internal. ‘We’re not gonna tell them about the fight, okay? Especially not the flamethrowers. If they ask, make it sound like Fang was being picked on by some punks or something. Anne doesn’t need the stress.’   
  
Venom _knew_ how to keep a secret, and he damn well knew how to selectively withhold information, but it was the ‘selectively’ part that was a problem. Eddie could feel that Venom didn’t quite get why it was important to keep these details back from their roommates, so Eddie impressed upon him the memory of Anne nearly throwing a grenade at them the night before. When she got stressed or thought there was danger, she was liable to start doing something rash, and nobody wanted that, especially when things were just starting to go their way.   
  
_‘Anne is a predator when distressed,’_ Venom said, imagining her with the wide, glowing eyes of some alien species.   
  
‘Yeah, like a tiger,’ Eddie said, supplanting a vision of a fierce jungle cat lunging at them.   
  
Although Venom was not entirely convinced _(we could take it,_ he thought, like any other time Eddie had tried to convince him something was a danger), he at least acquiesced, materializing his ill-formed little snake-like head at Eddie’s shoulder and agreeing with his last statement aloud. _“I will let no harm come to us,”_ he told Anne, quite sincerely and quite generically enough for Eddie’s liking.   
  
“You had better,” Anne said, though the threat in her voice was nowhere near as vitriolic as it had been just twenty-four hours before. “Don’t forget I know your weakness.”   
  
Venom didn’t respond to that, which was okay; it didn’t seem like Anne really expected him to. She and Dan wandered off to bed after that. Eddie and Venom did the same. Eddie sighed in relief once the door was closed behind him, glad to be so near his beautiful bed and to have some sort of privacy from other peoples’ expectations. (There was still Venom, of course, silently judging him from time to time, but he’d stopped being quite the same as ‘other people’ almost as soon as he’d first echoed in Eddie’s mind.) He stripped out of his new clothes and took a moment to set them on top of the dresser instead of leaving them in a pile on the floor before collapsing into bed. Although he wasn’t as dead tired as he’d been the night before, he was exhausted enough (and sated enough, food-wise and financially) that there wasn’t a damn thing in the world that sounded better than a good, long, deep sleep.   
  
Of course, Venom didn’t quite get that, and Eddie could feel him wiggling around in his brain. Not as much as he did normally, during the day, but even the slightest movement or shapeless, shifting thought was distracting when Eddie mostly wanted pure, still silence.   
  
‘Don’t tell me you guys don’t sleep,’ Eddie muttered in his head, too tired to speak out loud even if there was a reason.   
  
_‘We do,’_ Venom told him. _‘We rest throughout the day.’_ Memories of various mundane moments over the course of their acquaintance came to Eddie’s mind, far too clear and precise to be exactly his own. _‘They are yours,’_ Venom said, and Eddie supposed they must have been, just retrieved by the symbiote, because in each of them Eddie was almost entirely alone in his own quiet head. They weren’t long, just patches of a few minutes at a time while Eddie was busy doing something Venom apparently didn’t consider all that interesting, but Eddie hadn’t really noticed the silence at the time.   
  
‘So you’re a cat,’ he said with a faint huff of laughter. ‘Cat-napping whenever nothing’s happening.’   
  
(Venom thought about cats then, a pleasant little memory of the small creatures. Eddie wondered if that meant he would dislike dogs. An old memory of being a dog for a short while was brought forth; Venom liked them for different reasons. They couldn’t climb, and they didn’t purr, but they had a lot of delicious energy and they were _fast.)_   
  
‘Well there’s about to be a lot of nothing-happening for at least six hours,’ Eddie said, warning his bodymate of the impending silence that he could only imagine was going to cause boredom if Venom didn’t sleep through it.   
  
_‘All of our hosts have slept,’_ Venom told him, with soft memories of dog, bird, and human, each huddled somewhere safe to conserve energy when there was nothing to hunt. The imperfect matches that made the zombies didn’t sleep nearly as regularly as anyone else, spurred on by the parasites’ endless questing and relative disinterest in keeping them healthy, but it couldn’t be entirely avoided. Eddie vaguely wished he’d known this back when he was hunting; maybe they would have been able to ambush zombies when they were too tired to attack. Of course it was just trivia now.   
  
Eddie hummed sleepily. ‘Then I guess you know how to handle it.’   
  
_‘We can handle it,’_ he confirmed, and Eddie could feel him hunker down in the recesses of his mind, leaving his tired brain more blissfully blank than it had been in… days, at least, if not much longer.   
  
Finally, wonderfully, after a long day of accidental vigilantism, sleep took them.   
  
Seven AM rolled around much too soon for Eddie's liking, but at least he'd slept well. Well enough, in fact, that he would have kept at it if Venom hadn't woken him, stressing his various organs and muscles just enough that his body forgot it wanted to stay asleep and dragged Eddie forward into consciousness. 

_'Almost time for work,'_ Venom said, internally grinning with first-day-of-school eagerness. It seemed he'd been awake for a while, if he'd even slept. _'I slept,'_ he said in answer to Eddie's groggy unasked question. _'Then I watched your dreams.'_

"Hngh," Eddie said in response, and in his opinion Venom was lucky to get even that.   
  
Less sleep-tired than usual, but still a little dazed (even the symbiote couldn’t drag him to full consciousness immediately), he rolled over and started to get out of bed. That was when he noticed the black flesh painting his arms (and other parts of his body, from the feel of it). It just pulled at his skin very slightly, a subtle effect he hadn’t noticed most of the other times Venom had covered him-- probably because they’d been busy surviving at the time. He wondered why Venom was doing it. Was he… stretching? Trying to get some air? Eddie thought about making some sort of joke about it, but before he could come up with anything, Venom smoothly withdrew back into his body, silently, and didn’t explain himself. After that, Eddie let it slide.   
  
They didn’t bother having breakfast, since Kuai-Yong had promised them a meal, so they just got dressed in the clothes they’d been given the day before, and went to tidy up in the kitchen while they waited. 

Eddie had half expected Anne to be waiting for them, to remind them to be on their best behavior, and don’t rescue any more damsels in distress in broad daylight, etcetera, but both she and Dan had already left for early morning shifts. She hadn’t even left a note or anything.   
  
“Hey, you think she’s starting to trust us?” Eddie asked, smirking at the dishwasher as he loaded it.   
  
_‘Probably just forgot,’_ Venom said, and Eddie scoffed at him. Anne didn’t forget _shit;_ that was part of what made her a good lawyer. But Eddie conceded that he and Venom (despite their unusual circumstance) weren’t the be-all, end-all of Anne’s concerns, especially not anymore. He was glad, actually. He’d always felt bad, both for her and himself, when she’d fussed over him on his bad days.   
  
Right at eight o’clock, almost eerily on the dot, Eddie got a text alerting him that his driver was waiting in front of the apartment complex, so he grabbed his keys and his leather jacket (just in case, and because it sort of made him feel safer to have it), locked the door behind him, and jogged down to the car. He thought it was the same one from the night before, maybe, and possibly the same driver as before ( _‘You weren’t paying attention,’_ Venom said, and it would have sounded accusing if he hadn’t followed it up with, _‘Me neither.’)_ but the man didn’t say a word as they slid into the back seat. Eddie could only guess he spoke English because he’d texted him.   
  
The ride was quiet, and Eddie enjoyed watching the streets flash by. He hardly ever rode in cars these days. Most of the time he walked places, or took public transit if he was feeling luxurious. On the occasions when he took his bike, he couldn’t take his eyes off the road enough to watch the people and scenery as they passed by. (And he could do that on the bus, sure, but he mostly kept his head down on public transit, as was the etiquette; if you looked around, someone might think you were looking at _them,_ and nobody wanted that awkwardness.)   
  
The poorer parts of town definitely looked different from a car. The main difference, Eddie thought, was that you couldn’t smell it. The same could be said of the richer parts of town too, though with the opposite effect. From inside a bubble, the parts of the city seemed a little less distinct, and Eddie could slip into a shallow fantasy where nothing had changed since before the meteor. Of course, it _was_ a fantasy, and it _was_ shallow; Venom swirled around in his head at the merest mention of life before him, to remind Eddie that things would never go back. Eddie could tell he meant it reassuringly, but that was still something they didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on.   
  
After a mid-length drive through the early-rush hour traffic, they arrived at the Kuai-Yong residence. Or, the, uh…   
  
“Hey, um…” Eddie caught the driver’s attention as he was getting out of the car. “Mr. Kuai-Yong. Is that, uh, his last name or his first name?”   
  
Eddie liked to think the man didn’t roll his eyes, but the expression he gave was so extremely blank that he could only assume the guy was rolling his eyes internally. “His family name is Qiang,” the man said.   
  
“Oh, yeah, right,” Eddie said with a rather indiscrete cough. “Thanks.”   
  
The driver didn’t say anything more as he led them into the house and through its winding corridors to the dining room, where he left them. After yesterday, he was starting to get used to being led around and left places, but this particular time wasn’t awkward, since he recognized the room _(‘and the smell of food,’_ Venom thought, almost drooling), as well as one of the few people sitting around the table.   
  
“Mr. Brock!” the girl called cheerfully from her spot on the other side of the large table. She looked a little pleasantly surprised to see him-- a little surprised, anyway; a lot ‘pleasantly’.   
  
“Hey, Fang,” he said, taking a seat across from her, near where he’d sat before. He was happier to see her than he’d expected to feel, almost instinctively so.   
  
_‘We are like family,’_ Venom said, searching through Eddie’s old memories for the times when he was young and he felt excited to see his favorite cousins. He hadn’t kept up with any of them (any of his family at all, really), but he still thought fondly of how they played together as kids. He guessed he could see how this was similar, _sort of._   
  
“You can let your parasite out here,” Fang told him. “I mean, symbiote. Pretty much everyone who knows about me knows about you, so you don’t have to hide it.”   
  
‘Well, that answers one question,’ he thought with a slightly-uneasy laugh. He noticed that Dúshé was in snake form, coiled loosely around Fang’s neck, apparently napping. Venom didn’t take any more urging than that to come up out of Eddie’s skin, and poke his head forward enough to grab something off of one of the large platters.   
  
“Hey, manners,” Eddie chided, knowing he’d be grossed out if an ugly alien snake snatched food out of his serving dish-- if it wasn’t _his_ ugly alien snake, anyway. “Can’t you wait ten seconds for me to get a plate?”   
  
_“No,”_ Venom said, grabbing another random item, and Eddie sighed and shook his head, giving a long-suffering look to Fang, who was giggling over a bowl of some kind of goop. He didn’t think she quite understood his plight; Dúshé appeared to be a well-behaved pet, unlike Eddie’s little menace. Either way, she wasn’t stuffing her little snake face, so either she had better manners, or she wasn’t personally obsessed with tasting everything that went into their body. (To be fair, Venom’s proclivity towards eating with his own mouth was probably Eddie’s fault, since he kept tempting him with new foods in an effort to wean him off of a meat-only diet.)   
  
Luckily, nobody really batted an eye about his symbiote’s disgusting display, mostly at least _appearing_ to mind their own business. (Eddie thought this was probably something they achieved through practice, and not because they really didn’t care that the strange man at their table had a sentient growth.) Venom did finally acquiesce to eating from their plate once Eddie got food on it, and then got clever enough to actually use the provided utensils to refill the plate when it was empty, which Eddie appreciated. The two of them happily picked their way through the unusual offerings as Fang kept up conversation with him.   
  
“Hey, Mr. Brock, could you pass the bāozi?” she asked.   
  
“Which one’s the Bowser?” Eddie replied, only caring a little that he was probably butchering the Chinese word.   
  
“That one,” Fang said, pointing at a plate of steamed buns. It was closer to several of the other people at the table, so Eddie figured she was only asking him so she could get him to stumble over the foreign words, or so that he would be forced to use one of Venom’s little tentacles to grab the platter and pass it her way. It was definitely a game of some sort, and she covered it up by quickly following the request with personal questions. “Do you have a girlfriend?”   
  
Eddie was a bit taken aback by her forwardness, since most people would probably approach such a question in a round-about way, but he remembered that she was just a teenager. She probably hadn’t taken tact classes in school yet. “No,” he told her, “but I have two roommates. Anne and Dan.”   
  
“Are they twins?” Fang asked, looking a little surprised, and Eddie almost choked on his bāozi.   
  
“No,” he said, laughing. “Definitely not. They’re dating. Uh, engaged, actually.”   
  
Unhelpfully, Venom did exactly _that thing_ that Eddie had yet to teach him not to do. _“Eddie used to date Anne,”_ he told Fang, internally grinning like a child who was proud to share some obscure trivia.   
  
“Oooh, you live with your ex?” Fang asked with a very teenagery cringe.   
  
Eddie barely resisted not making an ugly face, but he really wanted to maintain some composure, not just because this was his (probable) new boss’s niece, but because he was an adult. “It’s complicated,” he told her.   
  
She was clearly unimpressed, but in that way that teenagers always were when anyone older than them tried to explain (or in this case, _not explain)_ something. Although she didn’t sound particularly judgmental when she replied, “Yeah, that’s what adults say when they don’t want to explain something because they know it’s going to make them sound bad.”   
  
She was basically right, and Eddie didn’t want to get into an argument or rescind his ‘complicated’ non-explanation, so he just said, “Pass the bowser, please.”   
  
Fang rolled her eyes but used one of Dúshé’s little arms (ones she sprouted from Fang’s hand, not little snake arms) to hand over the plate. It became a game, which was _mostly_ ignored by the others at the table, who otherwise seemed like they just might have found it very slightly funny.   
  
As breakfast finished and the diners began to clear out, Fang cleared her throat and asked, “So are you accepting the job, or did you just come for the free breakfast?”   
  
“Free breakfast,” Eddie said, trying to pick a piece of chive out from between his teeth with just his tongue. “Figure I should probably talk to your uncle about the job thing before I go making promises I can’t keep.”   
  
(A little protrusion formed in his mouth, which Eddie realized was Venom after one panicked second of thinking maybe he accidentally ate a bug or had a sudden terrible allergic reaction. The little bump was so small he couldn’t rightly call it a tentacle, and it very kindly picked the food from between his teeth with precision accuracy. It weirded Eddie out a little, but it solved his irritation so he didn’t complain.)   
  
“Want me to take you to him?” Fang asked as she stood from the table.   
  
Eddie made to follow her but he asked, mostly joking, “That won’t be a mark against me, will it? Getting insider help?”   
  
She scoffed, smiling at him. “We’re not the _mafia,”_ she said, and he couldn’t help but wonder if she really genuinely wasn’t aware of how much of an organized crime vibe her family gave off, or if she was just messing with him.   
  
Kuai-Yong wasn’t doing anything that seemed especially criminal though. They found him in a very ordinary office, furnished in dark woods like the rest of the house. He was sitting at the large desk, making notes in a ledger, and he didn’t look up when they entered through the open door, which Eddie assumed was completely normal for him and probably a way of asserting his importance. He finished what he was writing, which took about twenty seconds (during which time Eddie stood there with his hands behind his back and casually admired the decor), and then turned to them with an expression that was just this side of a smile.   
  
“I’m glad to see you have come,” he said, as if there was any room to doubt that Eddie would have, given what the man knew about him (which, chief among those facts, was that he was dirt poor).   
  
“Well, you said there’d be breakfast,” Eddie replied casually, hoping it wasn’t maybe a little bit _too_ casual at this stage. Or maybe this was the only acceptable time to be so casual, since the man technically wasn’t yet his employer. “Oh, um, it was good by the way, thanks.”   
  
Kuai-Yong nodded; breakfast was clearly a given. Or perhaps breakfast being ‘good’ was a given, which made sense. Eddie doubted they ate crappy food in a family like this. _(‘We should stay for the food, at least,’_ Venom said, predictably. Of course he’d be willing to involve himself in a family dangerous enough to need bodyguards, just for the food.)   
  
“I did say that I would repay you,” the man told him. “And I still intend to do better than breakfast, if you are interested in coming to an agreement.” He looked over Eddie’s shoulder then, to where Fang still hung in the doorway, obviously hoping to hear the details. She mostly suppressed a sigh.   
  
“Okay, I’ll go,” she drawled. She gave Eddie a shy, friendly smile. “See you, Mr. Brock.”   
  
She didn’t close the door behind her, but it hadn’t been closed when they’d arrived either. Eddie figured the open-door policy was Kuai-Yong’s way of showing he had nothing to hide. He didn’t even ask Eddie to come sit down closer so that they could conduct their conversation with a modicum of privacy, like most bosses in movies would.   
  
“So, are you willing to work for my family?” Kuai-Yong asked. “On a trial period, of course. I don’t expect you to commit to a long-term job without experiencing its particular rigors.”   
  
A part of Eddie (the part which was definitely not Venom; probably the part that still wanted to pretend he didn’t exist) thought he should really think a little harder about it before he said yes to even a trial period. They hadn’t put much thought into anything since the opportunity first presented itself, given how tired they had been the night before. But it was only a small part of Eddie, and even that part remembered how impossible it had been to find decent jobs over the past decade, so its hesitation was in no way strong enough to stop Eddie from responding, “Yes, sir.”   
  
A pleasantly unsurprised smile came onto Kuai-Yong’s face. “And does your partner also agree?”   
  
Venom stuck his little head up out of Eddie’s shoulder. _“Yes,”_ he said, drawing the word out in a way that almost sounded menacing, but which Eddie knew was really just excited. He paused for a second and then added, _“sir.”_   
  
‘Sir? Wow,’ Eddie thought at Venom, chuckling. ‘You must really want this job.’   
  
_‘It will be very good for us. The meat in this house is plentiful.’_   
  
Eddie worried for half a second that Venom was considering the various servants as back-up food, but it was just his uncanny sense of smell, sniffing out the kitchen several hallways away.   
  
“Then I will get you started right away,” Kuai-Yong said, standing from behind his desk and leading the way back out into the hall. Eddie followed dutifully along, and spent the next few hours being introduced to family members and their key servants.   
  
The day was a flurry of meeting people and learning the layout of the house, which was made easier by Venom’s innate sense of direction. Eddie was pretty good at faces and names though, while Venom seemed to think that remembering details about other people was below him. It worked out alright, between the two of them. Remembering everyone’s schedules, however, was going to take some good ol’ fashioned practice.   
  
There wasn’t a whole lot of actual work to be done, that first say. They mostly followed people around and watched what they were doing. Familiarity with everyone remotely important to Kuai-Yong was the biggest factor in Eddie’s new job as a bodyguard.   
  
Maybe the second biggest factor was looking vaguely respectable. He spent a good hour at a shop down the street from the house, getting his measurements taken, and being asked to try on various clothing items. Kuai-Yong wasn’t around for this part; he’d had to get back to his own work partway through the tour, and handed Eddie off to someone else, who’d show him whatever they were in charge of and then hand him off to another person. Eddie could only assume that they all knew what Kuai-Yong wanted, including the tailors, who seemed to have a specific look in mind. At their request, Eddie cycled through something like eight nearly-identical dark button-ups, six pairs of pants, five jackets, and several belts. Then they put him back in the polo and khakis he’d been given him the night before, and ushered him back to the house.   
  
Before the sun started to sink too low towards the horizon, they had another sparring match with just one of the men he’d fought before. “Jīnglǐ wants to keep you sharp,” he told Eddie, leading him out into the courtyard and taking a fighting stance. His expressions were a little more open and fluid, now that he wasn’t putting on a performance for the boss-man, and Eddie enjoyed the friendly (but not relaxed) tussle. Venom was practically overjoyed to get to fight someone again, after a day of relative stillness.   
  
The day ended with an early dinner, which resembled the one from the previous night, but a little more crowded, since they weren’t coming in at the tail end of it. He sat next to Fang, who was pleased as punch to see him.   
  
“So you stuck around for the whole day! Does that mean you’re taking the job?”   
  
“For now,” Eddie told her, quickly piling his plate with food so that Venom wouldn’t be tempted to reach across the table and squick people out. “We agreed on a trial period.”   
  
Fang pouted thoughtfully. “Do you think you’ll keep going after that?”   
  
Eddie shrugged. “Can’t say, after just today. We didn’t really do all that much work.”   
  
“I’m pretty sure uncle just wants you to follow people around when they leave the house,” Fang said, in what Eddie thought was probably a play at making the job sound as easy as possible. “You know. Just in case.”   
  
_“We are good at following people,”_ Venom said to her, in between mouthfuls.   
  
She grinned, glad that the symbiote was apparently on her side. “Then it’ll probably be super easy. And you can have breakfast and dinner here every day!”   
  
Smirking, Eddie countered with, “How do you know I don’t have somewhere else to be?”   
  
Fang gave him an unimpressed look. “You live with your ex.”   
  
Attempting to utilize some of that adult wisdom he was supposed to have, Eddie let the topic drop. They all returned to eating and instead amused themselves with Venom taunting Dúshé into lowering herself to his level and stuffing her little snake face. (That was how they found that both of the symbiotes were able to eat things most humans would spit out, like large pieces of cartilage and, more frighteningly, bones. They didn’t bother to pick the meat off of chicken drumsticks like their delicate hosts; they just swallowed them whole, like Dúshé’s namesake. It was a sight, and it only _didn’t_ make Eddie queasy because Venom kept the unnecessary involuntary reaction suppressed.)   
  
After dinner, Eddie was driven home again, and he and Venom spent the evening watching TV because they had nothing better to do. Eddie was surprised to find that for the first time in years, that felt like a good thing. He wasn’t constantly checking his phone for texts and emails, hoping for a job opening or interview, or wondering how to make twelve bucks last for a week of groceries without ending up super vitamin-deficient. He wasn’t fretting over being too useless for Anne and Dan to keep around, because if this job was the slightest bit sketchy, it was also at least as respectable. He wasn’t even concerned about when they’d pay him, because if nothing else he was being well-fed. (Not that that meant he wasn’t looking forward to being paid, just that it wasn’t gnawing at him the same way it would if hunger was.)   
  
His roommates got home at different times, but they both gave him quick interrogations before going about their own evening routines. In the end, the three of them (or four) all settled into the couch to share a tub of chocolate ice cream, which Anne had bought for the purpose of celebrating Eddie’s fancy new job.   
  
“I know I was skeptical about you working for Jiànkāng, but I really am proud of you. It’s a big step.”   
  
It was rare for the three of them to all be home at the same time in the evenings (and not rushing to bed for an early shift, which was common for Dan especially), and even just being able to spend time with each other was a potent reminder (on top of the rest of the last few days) of how good things could be when they weren’t falling apart. It left Eddie feeling almost _too_ optimistic as he got ready for bed.   
  
_“It was a good day,”_ Venom said, echoing his thoughts. _“Why do you think it was too good?”_   
  
“It wasn’t,” Eddie said, trying to think of how to explain. “Just, y’know, ‘too good to be true’ is what we say when things go so much better than you expected. A couple days ago, I felt like my life was slowly falling apart. Now it’s… yeah, it’s a lot better. So I just keep thinking, maybe something’s gonna go wrong.”   
  
_“Too good?”_ Venom repeated, thinking about the idea. He gave a feeling like a hum, reverberating softly through them both. _“You are too good, but you are true. Nothing will go wrong.”_   
  
Eddie rolled his eyes and collapsed into bed. “Don’t jinx it. You never know what’s gonna happen.”   
  
As usual, Venom wasn’t swayed. _“Nothing will go wrong. We will not let anything go wrong.”_   
  
Venom’s self-confidence was compelling, but Eddie had spent decades honing his very human ability to doubt, and the two went to battle. The day really had been so pleasantly normal that Venom’s optimism won the fight, though Eddie suspected it would have a harder time to win the war.   
  
They slept soundly, and in the morning they returned to Kuai-Yong’s house to start what would probably be their first day of _normal_ work, whatever that meant. Aside from meals and sparring, their day mostly consisted of sitting in cars. Just as the boss had said, and Fang had repeated, Eddie’s primary goal was to ensure the safety of various members of the Qiang family, and some of their closer associates, which basically meant that Eddie (in his new mostly black outfit, probably picked to make him seem at least a little imposing) went with people as they went out shopping or to various engagements.   
  
It was a little bit strange, shadowing Fang’s mother as she went out for the day, or riding with Fang as she was driven to one of her classes. (He didn’t go in with her though, which he thought was probably better. Venom would be bored to death by school, even the college-level business courses Fang was taking alongside the high school classes she did online and with personal tutors.) It wasn’t strange enough that he didn’t appreciate how incredibly easy the job was though. Even Venom was a little bit confused.   
  
_‘You made it sound like work was hard,’_ he said one evening as they finished work, far less exhausted than Eddie would have been from just about any other job, despite the long hours. _'This is easy. Why do they pay us so much?'_  
  
“This really isn’t a normal job,” Eddie explained, although he couldn’t help thinking the same thing: that they might be giving him more than the job was worth. (Because it _was_ kind of a lot of money.) He knew the truth though, which was that a bodyguard was worth it when it mattered. “I guess we get paid so much because they know we _might_ have to protect someone, like with Fang before.”   
  
_‘But you would have accepted much_ less _money.’_   
  
Eddie laughed. “Yeah, but don’t tell _them_ that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry there's only one chapter this month, but hey, at least it was long? (Is that a good thing? Hm.) 
> 
> Man, this month was busy with Yuletide and holiday prep, as expected, but I am hopeful about next month, since I should have more free time. (Unless, y'know, I'm busy playing video games all month. That... prooooobably won't happen. ^^; ) 
> 
> Anyway, Merry Christmas and etcetera! Hope you guys are all having a fantastic holiday season. Say, I've got a request for you though: in the spirit of giving, would you consider giving me one small thing? =] In the comments, I would love for you to tell me about one awesome thing you did/read/saw/etc this year! Anything that made you happy! I'd really love to hear about it! (And if you want to tell me what you think of the story too, well that'd be great too, of course. =D)

**Author's Note:**

> January 24th, 2020 EDIT: I needed to finish a different project, but I'm back to really trying to work on this one! Hoping to get a chapter out within the next few weeks at most. Thanks for your patience! 
> 
> Please do let me know if you have any thoughts or feelings! This thing has sat around on my computer for so long I've developed a healthy dose of anxiety about it, haha.  
> And BLESS people who read WIPs. <3 You guys are my driving force.


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